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Was Mayer's problem that people weren't getting their job done? Or was it that people weren't getting their job done while pretending to work super hard at it?
two things about Mayer that I think really sum up what she is like as a manager of people:
1) She was complaining that since the parking lot emptied out after 5 PM there must not be much work getting done.
At least she's there after 5pm. I'm getting really tired of bosses who bail at 3.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
So I'm in the defense industry, where we don't get to work from home for security reasons. I do sometimes need to work with people or teams at remote sites, though, and that's honestly bad enough. There's a thing in software engineering called Conway's Law, where the system you build has internal interfaces that reflect the communication structure of your team; I've never seen it broken. Teams with poor internal communication produce unmaintainable systems, usually over time and budget.
The fact that Yahoo had employees that were collecting paychecks while "working" remotely without doing any actual work is also entirely unsurprising. Look, if Yahoo's old method of doing things was successful, they wouldn't be currently circling the drain, so saying "clearly she is making the opposite of the correct decision!" seems a little premature.
As for the bit about hiring a nanny: wait just a minute, even if you're working from home, how are you doing work and dealing with your kid at the same time? You can't say on the one hand that working from home isn't really any more distracting than working from the office, and, on the other hand, say that working from home is great because you can raise your kid at the same time.
Now that I'm at home (I had to work in the office today). I'll elaborate on my situation.
My work-at-home situation is part of something called BCP (Business Continuity Program). The deal is if my company's building burns down/blows up/is disconnected from the interwebs, I can log in at a remote site (Which happens to be my house) and continue with mission-critical work. The upshot is I also get to do my job in my jammies in my bed when it's a ho-hum day. It was rolled out after the 9/11 attacks is is in place for other issues such as bird flu or really bad snowstorms. It also allows for when I'm at the office and the intranet goes down (Which is has), I can switch to a secondary public internet and link back in via VPN to the downtown offices. (Kinda slick actually) and still do my job too.
Funny thing, when things go south, I'm actually boned because the workload increases several fold. Maybe that's my confusion. I'm work at home for a business need to do so, not because my company is being "nice". There are only 250 of us out of a population of about 7K employees that can do this. My metrics slip, my work-at home is pulled. I know of a recent story when a woman got WFH, and her numbers went into the toilet. All it took was one recorded call. "No, Mommy's working right now, put that down!" to realize what was going on. Her authenticator was pulled and she was back in the office.
I'm seeing I'm not a typical work-at-home situation.
So I'm in the defense industry, where we don't get to work from home for security reasons. I do sometimes need to work with people or teams at remote sites, though, and that's honestly bad enough. There's a thing in software engineering called Conway's Law, where the system you build has internal interfaces that reflect the communication structure of your team; I've never seen it broken. Teams with poor internal communication produce unmaintainable systems, usually over time and budget.
The fact that Yahoo had employees that were collecting paychecks while "working" remotely without doing any actual work is also entirely unsurprising. Look, if Yahoo's old method of doing things was successful, they wouldn't be currently circling the drain, so saying "clearly she is making the opposite of the correct decision!" seems a little premature.
As for the bit about hiring a nanny: wait just a minute, even if you're working from home, how are you doing work and dealing with your kid at the same time? You can't say on the one hand that working from home isn't really any more distracting than working from the office, and, on the other hand, say that working from home is great because you can raise your kid at the same time.
The Venn diagram of telecommuting and prime cause of poor communication has virtually no overlap.
Yikes, reading this thread makes me really, really happy that I do IT for a young (average age 25, I think), tech-savvy company. Exchange or Outlook for email, seriously? We've been on Google Apps for at least 3 years. Never looked back. Pretty sure no one in the office owns a Blackberry. VPN is only for grabbing things off the fileserver in the off chance they're not on Google Drive. You poor bastards.
Yikes, reading this thread makes me really, really happy that I do IT for a young (average age 25, I think), tech-savvy company. Exchange or Outlook for email, seriously? We've been on Google Apps for at least 3 years. Never looked back. Pretty sure no one in the office owns a Blackberry. VPN is only for grabbing things off the fileserver in the off chance they're not on Google Drive. You poor bastards.
The phrase "Google Apps" gets a solid belly laugh from a security officer at a defense contractor.
Yikes, reading this thread makes me really, really happy that I do IT for a young (average age 25, I think), tech-savvy company. Exchange or Outlook for email, seriously? We've been on Google Apps for at least 3 years. Never looked back. Pretty sure no one in the office owns a Blackberry. VPN is only for grabbing things off the fileserver in the off chance they're not on Google Drive. You poor bastards.
We have legal reasons for what we do. Between HIPAA and data retention laws, we can't put out data on "the cloud". It's actually illegal for us to do so. In fact, it was kind of a nasty wake-up call to the field staff when we scanned for everyone using dropbox and sent a nastygram. Many didn't even know we had the ability to do that. (Field staff buy their own computers, but install our company OS image on it for bitlocker encryption/office/whatnot)
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that our way was right for others. I work for a small non-profit, and while our data security is tight, it's certainly not defense contractor tight. I just feel sorry for y'all having to deal with shit like Exchange.
I'm kind of annoyed at people criticizing Mayer for bringing her baby to work. Power has it's privileges, and she can spend her own money as she wants. Plenty of other CEOs have spent it on less meaningful things.
What Mayer should have done perhaps is offset the ill will by giving women employees an awesome maternity leave. Apparently Google ended up saving money by extending leave and making it more flexible, because the women became more loyal and less likely to leave. Free lunches and phones are nice I guess but I don't see how that builds loyalty.
0
syndalisGetting ClassyOn the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Products, Transition Teamregular
Yeah - I worked for a company that interfaced with NYSE / Euronext, and everything (even the iPhones and iPads) had to connect to the VPN to do as much as even pull mail from exchange servers that were managed as all get out. Not a drop of work could be done on machines not completely managed by the company. Even outlook web access was behind the VPN (not that anyone used it directly).
People saying "LOL exchange sucks use google" are out of their depth when it comes to truly big business - we would never score a contract if our private communication with multinational corporations was "in the cloud"
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that our way was right for others. I work for a small non-profit, and while our data security is tight, it's certainly not defense contractor tight. I just feel sorry for y'all having to deal with shit like Exchange.
I feel sorry for your lack of having an employer 401(k) match and reasonable healthcare prices.
So as an employee of a big tech company who went remote full time two years ago, I would say that Mayer is full of shit. Each employee's situation deserves to be evaluated individually. Do you really want a remote employee who's been mooching BACK in your office? Do you really think that the best employees are going to put up with your bullshit, or are they going to find jobs elsewhere? It just doesn't make sense on its head to issue a proclamation like she did. She's not a dumb lady, so I can only hope that she's doing this as a way to fire people without paying severance. But as others have pointed out, the ill will and lawsuits over this will dry up whatever savings that gets her. The remote staff couldn't have been that large for her to want to get rid of them all. There's always work in tech that's more suited for an individual, remote employee vs. someone local.
Maybe she's just in over her head and needs to do something to justify her CEO salary before collecting on her golden parachute.
At my company, logging into the VPN is the same as punching in. If you don't login, you don't get paid. The company has no way to track your hours worked, whether you're complying to schedule or even peak in on you to make sure that you're actually working if they have any doubts. Pulling everyone back into the office may raise eyebrows, but it's generally a lot easier to see if people are actually working or just looking busy when you can physically see them. Regardless, Yahoo is pretty much irrelevant these days. I'm surprised they've stayed afloat this long.
Now, I don't telecommute personally. As much as I'd love to save the money in time, gas and wear & tear on my car, I KNOW I'd be distracted. I have a dog that rarely leaves me alone (he's pestering me as I type this) and I couldn't imagine what it would be like if I had young children. Heck, right now I should be drawing concepts for this mod I'm working on but here I am in a thread talking about people dodging work.
...
I think I'll go back to what I'm supposed to be doing now.
Yeah, it sounds like their VPN people were mailing it in for years and just collecting a paycheck. Sounds like a former manager I knew. He was laid off (LONG overdue) and he transitioned his entire job in 20 minutes.
In recent tech news, Yahoo’s new CEO, Marissa Mayer, decided that employees could no longer work from home. They had until June to start working from the office, but if they are unable to relocate, they would no longer be working for the company. Shortly after this, Best Buy implemented this policy too. What has come out of this is cacophony of yelling and screaming from people in the tech industry that killing work-from home is a bad idea and will kill Yahoo’s already anemic productivity.
Earlier this week, it was revealed that Marissa looked at the VPN logs and found many employees not even logging in while they were at home. What came from this is another round of yelling and screaming that looking at VPN logs is not a good metric for productivity and if the work is getting done, there not really a need for metrics at all.
Here’s the odd bit. At my company I recently was given the *privilege* to work from home. For me to even get this I had to keep my metrics in 90% area for about a year. Now I don’t have a home office or anything. My apartment is actually 9x12 feet (I do have my own bathroom though, so that’s cool!)
To even log into my office from home I need a special cable connection (That my company is paying for), that gives me a LAN address. I also require a special router that will only work when it’s physically connected to my work laptop. From here, I log into the office using a WoW-like authenticator, then fire up a remote desktop session to a virtual machine and start my day. My software phone is the only application my computer runs “natively” and even that goes though the router.
Working from home and not connecting to VPN is completely alien to me. How can you not? How is there any accountability? If the computer’s not connecting back to the office, you might as well not even be at work. Now I admit, I do work for a company that deals with lots of secure info, but VPN is an encrypted connection to allow you to get company resources. If you are not even using the company infrastructure at work, then what are you doing? Am I not seeing the same thing Marissa is seeing?
Here is the metric of whether home working is a good idea or not
1. WFH and kids - If you are employed full time at a company, you cannot be watching your kids while working, you have to hire a nanny. Any remotely sane company requires this.
2. Marissa comes from Google, which has a strong campus culture to foster good work. These steps are probably part of an overall plan to improve the work product of the company. I can say for software dev, things go exponentially faster during design if everyone is in the same place.
3. If there is poor management, having people in the office helps expose it vs. employees not doing work. If they're working from home, every manager can fall back on "they're not doing their jobs even though I'm assigning work"
4. It could just be that they want a lot of people to quit without having to pay them proper severance.
Mayer saw another side-benefit to making this move. She knows that some remote workers won't want to start coming into the office and so they will quit. That helps Yahoo, which needs to cut costs. It's a layoff that's not a layoff.
The BI article also illustrates something else about Yahoo that is... well... quite interesting:
"A lot of people hid. There were all these employees [working remotely] and nobody knew they were still at Yahoo."
...
Mayer is happy to give Yahoo employees standard Silicon Valley benefits like free food and free smartphones. But our source says the kinds of work-from-home arrangements popular at Yahoo were not common to other Valley companies like Google or Facebook. "This is a collaborative businesses."
When you're telecommuting, you have to be actively engaged with your coworkers or your boss every single day. This isn't just for accountability, this is also because the best way to keep on your company's good side is to continually demonstrate your value. An invisible employee doesn't get promoted, at least not in the US.
So if Yahoo had a lot of telecommuting employees who were effectively invisible, that says something about the company's management structure.
Those aren't issues with home working. Those are issues with unbelievably shitty management. Sounds like the line managers of these people should be fired too, because they've been phoning it in as well. Hey, double layoff! Result!
I'm kind of annoyed at people criticizing Mayer for bringing her baby to work. Power has it's privileges, and she can spend her own money as she wants. Plenty of other CEOs have spent it on less meaningful things.
No one criticized her for bringing her kid to work.
They criticized her for bringing her kid to the staffed nursery she had built next to her office and then criticizing parents who used children as an "excuse" to not come in to work.
I just had a half work-from-home day, but I only get those about once a year when it snows really bad. Productivity of those WFH days is always in the shitter, but that's because we aren't prepared or set up for it. We've got no remote access to anything in the office, VPN or otherwise (email is web though). So it's pretty much just what we remembered to grab the day before and can manage to get working on our home PCs. It'd also be nice if our company had some sort of chat program in use but those always fizzle out.
If we set up for it though, I could easily see myself managing to work from home just fine one or two days a week.
If a company has poor management practices, they are going to have problems regardless of if their employees are working from home or sitting in the office all day (or any variation on the theme). A company with good management practices will usually do well regardless of the actual physical locations.
The key is always management. If you have employees 'working from home' but not actually doing anything - either because they don't have metrics, nobody is monitoring the work they should be (and actually are) doing, or because their managers themselves are equally detached and without oversight...of course you are going to have shit productivity. You can have employees in the office on Facebook all day, reading Cracked (or PA Forums) in the shitter, or hanging out at the water cooler too.
I understand the benefits of both working from home, and working from the office. Some individuals are amazing in one place and horrible in the other, and good management will identify that, and create policies that let managers find their employees strengths and work towards them. In general though, I definitely understand the benefits from having your employees in the office a significant amount of time. It does make it easier to engage and monitor their activity, especially when you don't have a good structure in place already.
Now, when I work from home, I frequently don't even fire up my work laptop. I use my gaming PC, simply because I prefer the bigger screen and don't want to fuss with a docking station or cables. I can use my Outlook Web Access for my mail, and do a good portion of work in the Office Suite and using our Dropbox-esque apps. All of the applications I work with / support are behind a health system firewall, so I'll only fire up AnyConnect and log into the VPN if and when I need to.
Really, the only time I need anything other than a generic 'internet connected' machine w/ AnyConnect is if I'm working with user credentials or PHI, and I'll use my work laptop for that. I'm not going to deal with a Compliance shit storm because I'm putting patient data on a personal machine. Unless he's looking at how quickly I respond to / close tickets and e-mails, my boss would probably have a hard time telling if I was doing anything at home, or if I was fucking off most of the day. Even then, if I was attentive to the queue, he probably would have trouble telling that until I stopped getting projects completed.
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that our way was right for others. I work for a small non-profit, and while our data security is tight, it's certainly not defense contractor tight. I just feel sorry for y'all having to deal with shit like Exchange.
I feel sorry for your lack of having an employer 401(k) match and reasonable healthcare prices.
We actually have an awesome employer 403(b) match and great healthcare, but I appreciate your concern
+2
TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
As sralchex said, measuring employee productivity by hours worked is only reasonable if you're paying them to be available (sit at the desk from 9-5 and greet clients; stand on the line for 8 hours and sort widgets). Accountability for WFH employees either comes from meaningful metrics such as sales or quantifiable output or from the reports of their team leads.
So yes, "if they aren't in the office then how do I know they're working?!" reeks of inept or lazy management.
If a company has poor management practices, they are going to have problems regardless of if their employees are working from home or sitting in the office all day (or any variation on the theme). A company with good management practices will usually do well regardless of the actual physical locations.
I don't think this is a universal rule. There are things that are fine to do from home. If I am just churning out bug fixes, working from home would probably only improve my productivity. If I am designing a complicated new service, working from home would be a much worse than collaborating within the office. Whenever I need to collaborate on a piece of design remotely, it is much much more difficult than doing it locally. It doesn't matter if I am working with a fantastic engineer at another site, it is just harder to do good design work when you aren't able to meet face to face and hash things out.
Yahoo cannot afford to be in a bug fix mode of operations. They actively need to create something people want to use asap. Work from home isn't amenable to that sort of idea creation. There is a reason Google tries to foster a generous in-office environment and it isn't altruism. They want people to collaborate in the office. The fact that the Yahoo CEO comes from a background where that sort of decision has paid dividends led to her instituting this new rule. And she has at least paid lip service to funding at least some of the perks available at Google to add a carrot dimension to her use of the stick. There are probably other reasons as well (using it as a soft layoff, productivity issues amongst some employees, etc). But the fact is, Yahoo needs to be more Google-like and less IBM-like if they want survive as an ongoing concern. This isn't a change made in a functioning company based on whimsy, it is a change designed to try and drastically alter the direction of a company that is failing. I don't think it will actually work, but the status quo has even less of a chance at success.
This is also the reason why 'just use appropriate metrics to see if people WFH are doing their job' isn't really feasible. Good metrics for creative work are notoriously hard to create. Yahoo doesn't have the luxury of trying to suss that out over the long run.
If your company has good communication and your teams work well together, some people being remote is not a problem. The problem is when things aren't perfect or ideal, working from home exacerbates any communication issues the team or company may have. It's also better for some jobs vs. others.
Prod support/Sysadmin/daily work type tasks - Location is not an issue
Creative/Collaborative development and design - Constantly being remote can be an issue, as you can't "whiteboard" effectively
Any obstacles can be overcome by the right employees and managers, but you need to design things based on people being lazy about communication and collaboration, as then even if the worst case of laziness comes true, you have it covered. Again, it's more a case by case basis, so I imagine they want to reset and re-evaluate what works and what doesn't.
I personally think a mix is ideal, where you have 2-3 days in the office and 2-3 days remote. This allows you to segment your work, get social/collaborative time and focus time.
If a company has poor management practices, they are going to have problems regardless of if their employees are working from home or sitting in the office all day (or any variation on the theme). A company with good management practices will usually do well regardless of the actual physical locations.
I don't think this is a universal rule. There are things that are fine to do from home. If I am just churning out bug fixes, working from home would probably only improve my productivity. If I am designing a complicated new service, working from home would be a much worse than collaborating within the office. Whenever I need to collaborate on a piece of design remotely, it is much much more difficult than doing it locally. It doesn't matter if I am working with a fantastic engineer at another site, it is just harder to do good design work when you aren't able to meet face to face and hash things out.
Yahoo cannot afford to be in a bug fix mode of operations. They actively need to create something people want to use asap. Work from home isn't amenable to that sort of idea creation. There is a reason Google tries to foster a generous in-office environment and it isn't altruism. They want people to collaborate in the office. The fact that the Yahoo CEO comes from a background where that sort of decision has paid dividends led to her instituting this new rule. And she has at least paid lip service to funding at least some of the perks available at Google to add a carrot dimension to her use of the stick. There are probably other reasons as well (using it as a soft layoff, productivity issues amongst some employees, etc). But the fact is, Yahoo needs to be more Google-like and less IBM-like if they want survive as an ongoing concern. This isn't a change made in a functioning company based on whimsy, it is a change designed to try and drastically alter the direction of a company that is failing. I don't think it will actually work, but the status quo has even less of a chance at success.
This is also the reason why 'just use appropriate metrics to see if people WFH are doing their job' isn't really feasible. Good metrics for creative work are notoriously hard to create. Yahoo doesn't have the luxury of trying to suss that out over the long run.
Of course it's not a universal rule - that's why I said a company with good management practices will usually do well, not always.
There are definite advantages to being present / face to face for collaboration. There are times (and positions) where face to face work is nothing more than a distraction. It takes good management to identify what is appropriate and when. I'd probably be far more productive if I worked from home 2-3 days / week, but I couldn't get by without at least a day or two in the office for meetings and collaboration.
The problems with Yahoo extend to far more then their employee's physical locations. They have been a sinking ship for a long time, and their best talent has long ago left for greener pastures. Basically, things like this are arranging deck chairs / polishing turds for Yahoo.
Yeah - I worked for a company that interfaced with NYSE / Euronext, and everything (even the iPhones and iPads) had to connect to the VPN to do as much as even pull mail from exchange servers that were managed as all get out. Not a drop of work could be done on machines not completely managed by the company. Even outlook web access was behind the VPN (not that anyone used it directly).
People saying "LOL exchange sucks use google" are out of their depth when it comes to truly big business - we would never score a contract if our private communication with multinational corporations was "in the cloud"
Good thing people aren't saying that then. What they ARE saying is that it's no longer 2007, and you don't need to use a VPN to maintain security. The need for complete management of your machines simply is not there anymore.
I'm kind of annoyed at people criticizing Mayer for bringing her baby to work. Power has it's privileges, and she can spend her own money as she wants. Plenty of other CEOs have spent it on less meaningful things.
No one criticized her for bringing her kid to work.
They criticized her for bringing her kid to the staffed nursery she had built next to her office and then criticizing parents who used children as an "excuse" to not come in to work.
And that she created a staffed nursery solely for her use, instead of one for all the employees.
If a company has poor management practices, they are going to have problems regardless of if their employees are working from home or sitting in the office all day (or any variation on the theme). A company with good management practices will usually do well regardless of the actual physical locations.
I don't think this is a universal rule. There are things that are fine to do from home. If I am just churning out bug fixes, working from home would probably only improve my productivity. If I am designing a complicated new service, working from home would be a much worse than collaborating within the office. Whenever I need to collaborate on a piece of design remotely, it is much much more difficult than doing it locally. It doesn't matter if I am working with a fantastic engineer at another site, it is just harder to do good design work when you aren't able to meet face to face and hash things out.
Yahoo cannot afford to be in a bug fix mode of operations. They actively need to create something people want to use asap. Work from home isn't amenable to that sort of idea creation. There is a reason Google tries to foster a generous in-office environment and it isn't altruism. They want people to collaborate in the office. The fact that the Yahoo CEO comes from a background where that sort of decision has paid dividends led to her instituting this new rule. And she has at least paid lip service to funding at least some of the perks available at Google to add a carrot dimension to her use of the stick. There are probably other reasons as well (using it as a soft layoff, productivity issues amongst some employees, etc). But the fact is, Yahoo needs to be more Google-like and less IBM-like if they want survive as an ongoing concern. This isn't a change made in a functioning company based on whimsy, it is a change designed to try and drastically alter the direction of a company that is failing. I don't think it will actually work, but the status quo has even less of a chance at success.
This is also the reason why 'just use appropriate metrics to see if people WFH are doing their job' isn't really feasible. Good metrics for creative work are notoriously hard to create. Yahoo doesn't have the luxury of trying to suss that out over the long run.
Her actions belie her "lip service". She could have easily implemented a corporate child care center for all the employees. Instead, she just built a staffed nursery for her own use.
Yeah - I worked for a company that interfaced with NYSE / Euronext, and everything (even the iPhones and iPads) had to connect to the VPN to do as much as even pull mail from exchange servers that were managed as all get out. Not a drop of work could be done on machines not completely managed by the company. Even outlook web access was behind the VPN (not that anyone used it directly).
People saying "LOL exchange sucks use google" are out of their depth when it comes to truly big business - we would never score a contract if our private communication with multinational corporations was "in the cloud"
Good thing people aren't saying that then. What they ARE saying is that it's no longer 2007, and you don't need to use a VPN to maintain security. The need for complete management of your machines simply is not there anymore.
Simply wrong. It's not there for everyone, but it absolutely is there for some industries.
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
I'm kind of annoyed at people criticizing Mayer for bringing her baby to work. Power has it's privileges, and she can spend her own money as she wants. Plenty of other CEOs have spent it on less meaningful things.
No one criticized her for bringing her kid to work.
They criticized her for bringing her kid to the staffed nursery she had built next to her office and then criticizing parents who used children as an "excuse" to not come in to work.
When did she actually criticize other working parents? In an interview or something?
I'm kind of annoyed at people criticizing Mayer for bringing her baby to work. Power has it's privileges, and she can spend her own money as she wants. Plenty of other CEOs have spent it on less meaningful things.
No one criticized her for bringing her kid to work.
They criticized her for bringing her kid to the staffed nursery she had built next to her office and then criticizing parents who used children as an "excuse" to not come in to work.
When did she actually criticize other working parents? In an interview or something?
When she was defending her decision to end telecommuting, she attempted to defang arguments that employees with families needed these arrangements for child care purposes by pointing out that she was a new mom, and she would be coming into the office.
Of course, when her private nursery was revealed, it blew up in her face.
Her actions belie her "lip service". She could have easily implemented a corporate child care center for all the employees. Instead, she just built a staffed nursery for her own use.
You can't 'easily' roll out in-house child care across a company with 14,000 employees. There would need to be a fair amount of groundwork, especially since child care has regulation attached as well. You don't just wave a wand and make it appear.
Plus in-house childcare for executives isn't that unusual. A CEO of a firm that large is going to basically live at the company anyhow. And has been said before, if people are regularly using WFH to avoid childcare, there are problems anyhow.
Yikes, reading this thread makes me really, really happy that I do IT for a young (average age 25, I think), tech-savvy company. Exchange or Outlook for email, seriously? We've been on Google Apps for at least 3 years. Never looked back. Pretty sure no one in the office owns a Blackberry. VPN is only for grabbing things off the fileserver in the off chance they're not on Google Drive. You poor bastards.
We have legal reasons for what we do. Between HIPAA and data retention laws, we can't put out data on "the cloud". It's actually illegal for us to do so. In fact, it was kind of a nasty wake-up call to the field staff when we scanned for everyone using dropbox and sent a nastygram. Many didn't even know we had the ability to do that. (Field staff buy their own computers, but install our company OS image on it for bitlocker encryption/office/whatnot)
HIPAA does not say you cannot have your data housed remotely. There are HIPAA-compliant hosting providers. (Late edit: Google is not one of them.)
If a business exec is saying "We can't put our data on cloud because HIPAA" there's a 10% chance he's actually saying "We spent all this money five years ago to make our on-premises systems HIPAA compliant and we don't see the business need to give all that up" and a 90% chance he's actually saying "I don't know anything about HIPAA except that it's a magic word that makes people stop asking me questions I don't like."
Good thing people aren't saying that then. What they ARE saying is that it's no longer 2007, and you don't need to use a VPN to maintain security. The need for complete management of your machines simply is not there anymore.
Simply wrong. It's not there for everyone, but it absolutely is there for some industries.
Yes, absolutely this.
I'd also add that "complete management of your machines" and "VPN" are not and should not be considered synonymous. There is a very large overlap there, but not all VPNs are used with remote management, and not all remote management requires VPNs.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Those aren't issues with home working. Those are issues with unbelievably shitty management. Sounds like the line managers of these people should be fired too, because they've been phoning it in as well. Hey, double layoff! Result!
That was more or less what I was saying, yeah.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
There are 'child care' options involved in WFH beyond "I'm with my toddler all day and need to have a direct line of sight on them at all times". If your kid is school aged, WFH can let you build time into your schedule to take them to school and pick them up, even such that you end your 'work day' when they leave school, or take a couple of hours break until your spouse or whatever is there to watch them while you finish up work. If you do have a toddler, you can have an in-home nanny without having to necessarily worry about issues like property damage and theft, and knowing that you're 20 feet from your kid in the event of an emergency. Or, if you're taking them to child care, you don't have to find a daycare place that happens to work with your in-office schedule and worry about the vagaries of traffic, last-minute pickup meetings in the office, etc.
Shit, I don't even have kids and I can see where working from home would be a huge boon to a person who already has their child care shit straight on the basis of working in-office.
As for tracking what your people are doing at home: most jobs that allow work-from-home either have hardcore production metrics (medical billing, telephone answering/support, shit like that) or have really soft metrics (programming and such). In the first case, does it matter when or for how long they work? You have metrics for that anyway. In the second case, that's their manager's problem. Yeah, you need good communication and to stay visible, but it's up to the person's manager to ensure that they're staying up to code not the goddamned CEO of the company.
We have a guy on my team who worked in-office until he moved to PA a few months ago so his SO can go to grad school or something. I think I talk to this dude more now that he's in PA (I'm in NC) than I did when he was at the other end of the building. There's a guy in Ireland I talk to more than I talk to people who sit on the second floor of this office building. And it's those people's managers' job to make sure it stays that way.
Punching in? Logging hours on the VPN? That's a bunch of shit for micromanagement addicts. My boss knows what I'm working on, he knows my deadlines, and we have a daily team stand-up to make sure everyone is still on target. If I'm behind on something, he's going to know about it and he's going to come and ask me why. If people aren't hearing from me or I'm not communicating well, he's going to talk to me about it. And come review time, if I'm doing a shit job, I'm going to get a bad review and possibly canned.
Like someone said up-thread: if you have a bunch of under-performing WFH employees, they should get fired and replaced by employees who do their jobs. Odds are good that people who slack off at home are going to slack off at work, too. If you have a bunch of under-performing WFH employees and the situation is so bad that the CEO has to take it into her own hands (which I'm not saying it is; I wouldn't doubt this lady just got a wild hair, considering her 5pm car lot bullshit) then you have a management problem. Fire the managers and see if new management can get your WFH's performing. If not, they should at least be able to tell you that the WFHs are slacking so that you can fire the slack-asses and get new ones.
1. WFH and kids - If you are employed full time at a company, you cannot be watching your kids while working, you have to hire a nanny. Any remotely sane company requires this.
2. Marissa comes from Google, which has a strong campus culture to foster good work. These steps are probably part of an overall plan to improve the work product of the company. I can say for software dev, things go exponentially faster during design if everyone is in the same place.
3. If there is poor management, having people in the office helps expose it vs. employees not doing work. If they're working from home, every manager can fall back on "they're not doing their jobs even though I'm assigning work"
4. It could just be that they want a lot of people to quit without having to pay them proper severance.
Mayer saw another side-benefit to making this move. She knows that some remote workers won't want to start coming into the office and so they will quit. That helps Yahoo, which needs to cut costs. It's a layoff that's not a layoff.
The BI article also illustrates something else about Yahoo that is... well... quite interesting:
"A lot of people hid. There were all these employees [working remotely] and nobody knew they were still at Yahoo."
...
Mayer is happy to give Yahoo employees standard Silicon Valley benefits like free food and free smartphones. But our source says the kinds of work-from-home arrangements popular at Yahoo were not common to other Valley companies like Google or Facebook. "This is a collaborative businesses."
When you're telecommuting, you have to be actively engaged with your coworkers or your boss every single day. This isn't just for accountability, this is also because the best way to keep on your company's good side is to continually demonstrate your value. An invisible employee doesn't get promoted, at least not in the US.
So if Yahoo had a lot of telecommuting employees who were effectively invisible, that says something about the company's management structure.
Yeah, I think people are being unnecessarily harsh on her for trying to clean up the situation previous management created. Obviously work at home programs can function successfully if proper accountability and tools are in place, but it sounds like at Yahoo! they weren't, and you can't just turn around terrible company culture very easily without drastic changes. The goal is to shock some life into a dying company, which for better or worse is her job.
It's not a philosophical stand against working at home. It's a stand against Yahoo's lazy and ineffectual employees working at home. One option is to simply fire them, but then you have to re-hire, re-train and wait for them to get re-acclimated. Plus the headlines would look a lot worse if it were those people getting fired, rather than those people being forced into the office. She's basically trying to create an environment like Google's, where you get a ton of benefits in the office and you want to come in to work, which leads to better collaboration, etc. She's actually improving work benefits, but trying to crack the whip as well.
I don't think it's that bad, and I think people overrate the quality of work they do on their own. Productivity doesn't necessarily make for good work, especially in a company like Yahoo that's as team focused as it is.
I agree on the criticisms regarding childcare and her own nursery, but I still don't see the overall move as such a bad thing.
One other thing is that we've only heard about changes for ground level employees from a leaked company HR memo. I'd imagine managers are very much to blame for the poor accountability of the at-home workers, and they could be catching a lot of hell as well.
If it's just the at-home people in trouble, then she might have a myopic view of things. But it could very well be that middle management and higher is in trouble too, and we just don't know about it because those memos don't get leaked.
What they ARE saying is that it's no longer 2007, and you don't need to use a VPN to maintain security.
No, it's 2013, and if you care about security you have an air-gapped network in a secure building (and you don't let people plug external devices into that network, not after Stuxnet jumped the gap!). Or you don't really care about security, which is an entirely valid position in a lot of places! In either case a VPN is sort of pointless.
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At least she's there after 5pm. I'm getting really tired of bosses who bail at 3.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Generally means I'm bailing ten minutes later.
The fact that Yahoo had employees that were collecting paychecks while "working" remotely without doing any actual work is also entirely unsurprising. Look, if Yahoo's old method of doing things was successful, they wouldn't be currently circling the drain, so saying "clearly she is making the opposite of the correct decision!" seems a little premature.
As for the bit about hiring a nanny: wait just a minute, even if you're working from home, how are you doing work and dealing with your kid at the same time? You can't say on the one hand that working from home isn't really any more distracting than working from the office, and, on the other hand, say that working from home is great because you can raise your kid at the same time.
My work-at-home situation is part of something called BCP (Business Continuity Program). The deal is if my company's building burns down/blows up/is disconnected from the interwebs, I can log in at a remote site (Which happens to be my house) and continue with mission-critical work. The upshot is I also get to do my job in my jammies in my bed when it's a ho-hum day. It was rolled out after the 9/11 attacks is is in place for other issues such as bird flu or really bad snowstorms. It also allows for when I'm at the office and the intranet goes down (Which is has), I can switch to a secondary public internet and link back in via VPN to the downtown offices. (Kinda slick actually) and still do my job too.
Funny thing, when things go south, I'm actually boned because the workload increases several fold. Maybe that's my confusion. I'm work at home for a business need to do so, not because my company is being "nice". There are only 250 of us out of a population of about 7K employees that can do this. My metrics slip, my work-at home is pulled. I know of a recent story when a woman got WFH, and her numbers went into the toilet. All it took was one recorded call. "No, Mommy's working right now, put that down!" to realize what was going on. Her authenticator was pulled and she was back in the office.
I'm seeing I'm not a typical work-at-home situation.
The Venn diagram of telecommuting and prime cause of poor communication has virtually no overlap.
The phrase "Google Apps" gets a solid belly laugh from a security officer at a defense contractor.
We have legal reasons for what we do. Between HIPAA and data retention laws, we can't put out data on "the cloud". It's actually illegal for us to do so. In fact, it was kind of a nasty wake-up call to the field staff when we scanned for everyone using dropbox and sent a nastygram. Many didn't even know we had the ability to do that. (Field staff buy their own computers, but install our company OS image on it for bitlocker encryption/office/whatnot)
What Mayer should have done perhaps is offset the ill will by giving women employees an awesome maternity leave. Apparently Google ended up saving money by extending leave and making it more flexible, because the women became more loyal and less likely to leave. Free lunches and phones are nice I guess but I don't see how that builds loyalty.
People saying "LOL exchange sucks use google" are out of their depth when it comes to truly big business - we would never score a contract if our private communication with multinational corporations was "in the cloud"
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Maybe she's just in over her head and needs to do something to justify her CEO salary before collecting on her golden parachute.
Now, I don't telecommute personally. As much as I'd love to save the money in time, gas and wear & tear on my car, I KNOW I'd be distracted. I have a dog that rarely leaves me alone (he's pestering me as I type this) and I couldn't imagine what it would be like if I had young children. Heck, right now I should be drawing concepts for this mod I'm working on but here I am in a thread talking about people dodging work.
...
I think I'll go back to what I'm supposed to be doing now.
I like the cut of his jib.
Here is the metric of whether home working is a good idea or not
(1) Does the home worker get their work done?
(2) That's pretty much it.
Those aren't issues with home working. Those are issues with unbelievably shitty management. Sounds like the line managers of these people should be fired too, because they've been phoning it in as well. Hey, double layoff! Result!
No one criticized her for bringing her kid to work.
They criticized her for bringing her kid to the staffed nursery she had built next to her office and then criticizing parents who used children as an "excuse" to not come in to work.
If we set up for it though, I could easily see myself managing to work from home just fine one or two days a week.
The key is always management. If you have employees 'working from home' but not actually doing anything - either because they don't have metrics, nobody is monitoring the work they should be (and actually are) doing, or because their managers themselves are equally detached and without oversight...of course you are going to have shit productivity. You can have employees in the office on Facebook all day, reading Cracked (or PA Forums) in the shitter, or hanging out at the water cooler too.
I understand the benefits of both working from home, and working from the office. Some individuals are amazing in one place and horrible in the other, and good management will identify that, and create policies that let managers find their employees strengths and work towards them. In general though, I definitely understand the benefits from having your employees in the office a significant amount of time. It does make it easier to engage and monitor their activity, especially when you don't have a good structure in place already.
Now, when I work from home, I frequently don't even fire up my work laptop. I use my gaming PC, simply because I prefer the bigger screen and don't want to fuss with a docking station or cables. I can use my Outlook Web Access for my mail, and do a good portion of work in the Office Suite and using our Dropbox-esque apps. All of the applications I work with / support are behind a health system firewall, so I'll only fire up AnyConnect and log into the VPN if and when I need to.
Really, the only time I need anything other than a generic 'internet connected' machine w/ AnyConnect is if I'm working with user credentials or PHI, and I'll use my work laptop for that. I'm not going to deal with a Compliance shit storm because I'm putting patient data on a personal machine. Unless he's looking at how quickly I respond to / close tickets and e-mails, my boss would probably have a hard time telling if I was doing anything at home, or if I was fucking off most of the day. Even then, if I was attentive to the queue, he probably would have trouble telling that until I stopped getting projects completed.
We actually have an awesome employer 403(b) match and great healthcare, but I appreciate your concern
So yes, "if they aren't in the office then how do I know they're working?!" reeks of inept or lazy management.
I don't think this is a universal rule. There are things that are fine to do from home. If I am just churning out bug fixes, working from home would probably only improve my productivity. If I am designing a complicated new service, working from home would be a much worse than collaborating within the office. Whenever I need to collaborate on a piece of design remotely, it is much much more difficult than doing it locally. It doesn't matter if I am working with a fantastic engineer at another site, it is just harder to do good design work when you aren't able to meet face to face and hash things out.
Yahoo cannot afford to be in a bug fix mode of operations. They actively need to create something people want to use asap. Work from home isn't amenable to that sort of idea creation. There is a reason Google tries to foster a generous in-office environment and it isn't altruism. They want people to collaborate in the office. The fact that the Yahoo CEO comes from a background where that sort of decision has paid dividends led to her instituting this new rule. And she has at least paid lip service to funding at least some of the perks available at Google to add a carrot dimension to her use of the stick. There are probably other reasons as well (using it as a soft layoff, productivity issues amongst some employees, etc). But the fact is, Yahoo needs to be more Google-like and less IBM-like if they want survive as an ongoing concern. This isn't a change made in a functioning company based on whimsy, it is a change designed to try and drastically alter the direction of a company that is failing. I don't think it will actually work, but the status quo has even less of a chance at success.
This is also the reason why 'just use appropriate metrics to see if people WFH are doing their job' isn't really feasible. Good metrics for creative work are notoriously hard to create. Yahoo doesn't have the luxury of trying to suss that out over the long run.
Prod support/Sysadmin/daily work type tasks - Location is not an issue
Creative/Collaborative development and design - Constantly being remote can be an issue, as you can't "whiteboard" effectively
Any obstacles can be overcome by the right employees and managers, but you need to design things based on people being lazy about communication and collaboration, as then even if the worst case of laziness comes true, you have it covered. Again, it's more a case by case basis, so I imagine they want to reset and re-evaluate what works and what doesn't.
I personally think a mix is ideal, where you have 2-3 days in the office and 2-3 days remote. This allows you to segment your work, get social/collaborative time and focus time.
Of course it's not a universal rule - that's why I said a company with good management practices will usually do well, not always.
There are definite advantages to being present / face to face for collaboration. There are times (and positions) where face to face work is nothing more than a distraction. It takes good management to identify what is appropriate and when. I'd probably be far more productive if I worked from home 2-3 days / week, but I couldn't get by without at least a day or two in the office for meetings and collaboration.
The problems with Yahoo extend to far more then their employee's physical locations. They have been a sinking ship for a long time, and their best talent has long ago left for greener pastures. Basically, things like this are arranging deck chairs / polishing turds for Yahoo.
Good thing people aren't saying that then. What they ARE saying is that it's no longer 2007, and you don't need to use a VPN to maintain security. The need for complete management of your machines simply is not there anymore.
And that she created a staffed nursery solely for her use, instead of one for all the employees.
Her actions belie her "lip service". She could have easily implemented a corporate child care center for all the employees. Instead, she just built a staffed nursery for her own use.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
When did she actually criticize other working parents? In an interview or something?
When she was defending her decision to end telecommuting, she attempted to defang arguments that employees with families needed these arrangements for child care purposes by pointing out that she was a new mom, and she would be coming into the office.
Of course, when her private nursery was revealed, it blew up in her face.
You can't 'easily' roll out in-house child care across a company with 14,000 employees. There would need to be a fair amount of groundwork, especially since child care has regulation attached as well. You don't just wave a wand and make it appear.
Plus in-house childcare for executives isn't that unusual. A CEO of a firm that large is going to basically live at the company anyhow. And has been said before, if people are regularly using WFH to avoid childcare, there are problems anyhow.
HIPAA does not say you cannot have your data housed remotely. There are HIPAA-compliant hosting providers. (Late edit: Google is not one of them.)
If a business exec is saying "We can't put our data on cloud because HIPAA" there's a 10% chance he's actually saying "We spent all this money five years ago to make our on-premises systems HIPAA compliant and we don't see the business need to give all that up" and a 90% chance he's actually saying "I don't know anything about HIPAA except that it's a magic word that makes people stop asking me questions I don't like."
Yes, absolutely this.
I'd also add that "complete management of your machines" and "VPN" are not and should not be considered synonymous. There is a very large overlap there, but not all VPNs are used with remote management, and not all remote management requires VPNs.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
That was more or less what I was saying, yeah.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Shit, I don't even have kids and I can see where working from home would be a huge boon to a person who already has their child care shit straight on the basis of working in-office.
As for tracking what your people are doing at home: most jobs that allow work-from-home either have hardcore production metrics (medical billing, telephone answering/support, shit like that) or have really soft metrics (programming and such). In the first case, does it matter when or for how long they work? You have metrics for that anyway. In the second case, that's their manager's problem. Yeah, you need good communication and to stay visible, but it's up to the person's manager to ensure that they're staying up to code not the goddamned CEO of the company.
We have a guy on my team who worked in-office until he moved to PA a few months ago so his SO can go to grad school or something. I think I talk to this dude more now that he's in PA (I'm in NC) than I did when he was at the other end of the building. There's a guy in Ireland I talk to more than I talk to people who sit on the second floor of this office building. And it's those people's managers' job to make sure it stays that way.
Punching in? Logging hours on the VPN? That's a bunch of shit for micromanagement addicts. My boss knows what I'm working on, he knows my deadlines, and we have a daily team stand-up to make sure everyone is still on target. If I'm behind on something, he's going to know about it and he's going to come and ask me why. If people aren't hearing from me or I'm not communicating well, he's going to talk to me about it. And come review time, if I'm doing a shit job, I'm going to get a bad review and possibly canned.
Like someone said up-thread: if you have a bunch of under-performing WFH employees, they should get fired and replaced by employees who do their jobs. Odds are good that people who slack off at home are going to slack off at work, too. If you have a bunch of under-performing WFH employees and the situation is so bad that the CEO has to take it into her own hands (which I'm not saying it is; I wouldn't doubt this lady just got a wild hair, considering her 5pm car lot bullshit) then you have a management problem. Fire the managers and see if new management can get your WFH's performing. If not, they should at least be able to tell you that the WFHs are slacking so that you can fire the slack-asses and get new ones.
Yeah, I think people are being unnecessarily harsh on her for trying to clean up the situation previous management created. Obviously work at home programs can function successfully if proper accountability and tools are in place, but it sounds like at Yahoo! they weren't, and you can't just turn around terrible company culture very easily without drastic changes. The goal is to shock some life into a dying company, which for better or worse is her job.
It's not a philosophical stand against working at home. It's a stand against Yahoo's lazy and ineffectual employees working at home. One option is to simply fire them, but then you have to re-hire, re-train and wait for them to get re-acclimated. Plus the headlines would look a lot worse if it were those people getting fired, rather than those people being forced into the office. She's basically trying to create an environment like Google's, where you get a ton of benefits in the office and you want to come in to work, which leads to better collaboration, etc. She's actually improving work benefits, but trying to crack the whip as well.
I don't think it's that bad, and I think people overrate the quality of work they do on their own. Productivity doesn't necessarily make for good work, especially in a company like Yahoo that's as team focused as it is.
I agree on the criticisms regarding childcare and her own nursery, but I still don't see the overall move as such a bad thing.
If it's just the at-home people in trouble, then she might have a myopic view of things. But it could very well be that middle management and higher is in trouble too, and we just don't know about it because those memos don't get leaked.
No, it's 2013, and if you care about security you have an air-gapped network in a secure building (and you don't let people plug external devices into that network, not after Stuxnet jumped the gap!). Or you don't really care about security, which is an entirely valid position in a lot of places! In either case a VPN is sort of pointless.