This was the first thing that crossed my mind. Want to cut some payroll without the expense and trouble of severance packages? Here you go.
[QUOTE=MrDibble]
Scuttlebutt in my development office is that this move is actually a way to force voluntary downsizing of the staff complement.
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I’m embarrassed to say this is not the first thing that crossed my mind, but it should have been.
I work for a fairly large company in CA. We have several campuses, and all of them are full - there are literally no empty work spaces on my floor and in my building. Parts of my department have grown in the last year, but there is no place to put the new workers, so they are allowing some of them to telecommute full-time. The company would rather acquire the right talent than worry about where they sit.
We may end up in a situation where people are desk-sharing, which would allow people to be in the office 2-3 days a week. People in certain roles have the option of telecommute one day a week, which I take advantage of and consider it a perk. I end up logging on earlier and working later than I do when I am in the office. YMMV.
If Yahoo were making tons of money and leading the industry I bet she’d care less.
Clearly she feels like she needs to make some changes, and it is not surprising that she is going to copy what Google does. I’m betting there are plenty of cars in the parking lot at 5 there. There are plenty where I work, and we don’t have free food, only free drinks.
I meant, “they can’t simply shut down…”, just in case anyone was wondering.
Considering that Yahoo has about 14K employees overall, and according to available data only a few hundred of those work remotely, this doesn’t sound like the kind of paradigm shift they need to be doing. We’re talking about 5% of their workforce, maybe a bit more, who are being subjected to a very public slap in the face. It’s almost like they’re being pilloried–just take a look at the comments following the article I linked to.
What if those people needed to be slapped? The link I quoted before had comments from several Yahoo! employees who think this is a good thing. Management experts, and the leaders in their particular field broadly agree that creativity suffers when you allow too many people to be physically disconnected from the workplace. If she were just worried about productivity, you would have a point since people on average tend to be just as, or more productive when telecommuting. But Yahoo! problem is not that they don’t do enough of what they already do, it’s that they are worse at what they do than most of their competitors. Getting better doesn’t mean just working longer days; it means getting creative and becoming more forward thinking. The types of creative solutions and ideas Yahoo! needs to stave off a slow death are less likely to happen if you don’t create an environment where serendipitous interactions occur.
Regardless, as Yahoo! has said in response to reporters, they feel this is what works for them, right now. They may find out it blows up in their face, or doesn’t have the results they expected. But it’s odd that what one (fairly middling) company has chosen to do has become fodder for public discussion. Not to say the merits of telecommuting cannot be discussed. Just that few people are in as good a position to know what is best for Yahoo! than the people who made this decision. And to make the discussion about how stupid Yahoo! is for doing this seems to be backed by very little evidence or even anecdote. They could be wrong, but they certainly have a better vantage than most to decide what will work for them.
No question that it was done stupidly. This is not the kind of thing you want on the front page of the Merc and the NY Times.
The Times said that studies show that telecommuters are more productive but less innovative than people working in offices. I’ve seen more rage from the telecommuters than from people favoring going to the office. You said people were having fits about this - what kind of people are they? I haven’t run into that many anal bosses in Silicon Valley. I’ve worked for companies strongly encouraging telecommuting to the extent that lots of people didn’t have permanent offices, and other companies that allow it under special circumstances.
But no one is all that nuts about the subject.
Mayer probably believes she must show she is a nut-cuttin’ hardass in order to make an impression with the old-boy investment crowd. She may have a point. Investors sometimes put more faith in a hardass even when results don’t follow.
There is no “probably” about it. They specifically said they are trying to passively reduce headcount by forcing out anyone who is unwilling to commute.
Like I said. Marissa Mayer would probably be a better COO instead of a CEO. All she is doing is trying to streamline operations. I don’t have a sense that she has any sort of vision for the company. Is her plan to compete with Google and Facebook on operational efficiency?
That was one of the things that turned me off about IBM when I interviewed with them. Their entire consulting practice is scattered around the country. I know people who never met their manager. I assume you just get a call or email to report to some client at such and such time.
FYI, I am working from home right now. We are still trying to figure out the formal policy because we don’t want the whole building empty. But when Hurricane Sandy flooded lower Manhattan, the big Wall Street insurance company where I work was only able to stay functional for several months because most of us have the ability to work from home.
Ten or fifteen years ago I might have agreed with this, notwithstanding my own inclinations and personal circumstances that would have made telecommuting highly attractive to me. But today the technology has advanced to the point where that isn’t much of a justification anymore. If you telecommute today you can be just as well-connected to your coworkers and managers even without being physically present. OTOH, as I pointed out upthread, it often happens that when you do go to the office you spend very little time in the physical presence of coworkers, managers, and clients anyway. You collaborate with others remotely, even though you’re in the same building. You use instant messaging because it’s so much more efficient to have a typed record of a conversation as opposed to scribbling down notes during a live conversation or phone call. I admit, this isn’t best for everyone but I think it does become more common as you go downward in the org chart.
Natural leaders who get promoted tend to be much better than average speakers who thrive on oral communication. If you think about it, it seems the higher up you go in the org chart, the more your day-to-day job consists of oral communication in one form or another. Why are there one-page “executive summaries” of projects and plans It’s because the top people in the company usually don’t need to go into every little detail in order to perform successfully. By contrast, the lower level staffers who create and use the hundreds of pages of documentation, and the systems themselves, that underlie those brief exec reports do have to sweat through all that detail.
The point of all this is that people come in different sorts, and a one-size-fits-all approach to telecommuting doesn’t lead to the best possible contributions from each and every employee. Yet the people who rise to executive status are almost invariably the natural leader golden-voiced types, and since they are executives it’s they who get to make the call. They do that based on what works best for them personally, which is only human nature after all. But it sure doesn’t work that well for all concerned. In my opinion neither does it work best for the company.
From the some of the remarks in the leaked memo, it appears that once the telecommuting Yahoos begin commuting to the office, they can expect a plethora of mandatory meetings which will be unnecessary and wasteful much of the time, cutting hours out of their normal worktime. As a result they will continue to do a lot of their work from home, after hours; they’d better keep their home offices at the ready.
I don’t know about you, but I spend a lot of time in the presence of coworkers. I agree that sometimes a written record is important, but there are plenty of massive email threads with data and charts that happen even though everyone is close to each other. So, you can have most of the benefits of telecommuting at work (not including short commute and working in your pjs) but you don’t get the benefits of interaction at home. (Now, we have doors, so I can work uninterruptedly if I want. I’ve also trained everyone to not expect me to answer email instantaneously.)
Different people have different modes of interaction. Someone loving the phone might do fine at home. But there are lots of people who do better fact to face.
An example. I’ve been involved with a conference for a long time. When I first got on the Program Committee, over 20 years ago, we had 3 meetings a year, one at the conference. As we moved paper selection onto the web we went down to 2, one at the conference. Now, because of tight travel budgets, there is only a teleconference. The cohesion of the committee has totally fallen apart, many members don’t step up to their responsibilities, and there are fewer and fewer new ideas. The sense of teamwork, of being a part of the conference, is totally gone. I’ve been on plenty of program committees which never meet in person, and I definitely do my job and nothing more for them.
I’ve managed people remotely, and I’ve managed people across the hall, and it is not the same thing - and no one was goofing off.
I think you’re projecting a lot of your personal feelings about telecommuniting into a general concept here, and I’m not sure it’s all that well supported. Right now in the software space I think the three largest companies in descending order on the Forbes 2000 are Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP. They are mostly more traditional work environments, and rely on pretty rigorous and “old school” software development approaches that involve physically present teams, lots of in person meetings and etc. Arguably though, something all three of those companies have in common is they are “old”, they’ve ensconced themselves in segments of the market place where they have strong (but not unassailable) walls around their business and deep entrenchment with the enterprise. They aren’t the most creative companies, Microsoft is the only one of the three that really seems to try to be creative and involved in newer consumer oriented technologies but with mixed success they come off looking like grandpa trying to record a rap video.
Yahoo! most likely wants to be more like Google and Facebook. Google and Facebook seem to expect people to mostly come to the office. At the office, they mostly expect you to be someone who wants to be at the office. They’d rather not even talk about a work schedule, because they are cool with you coming in sometime mid-morning and then based on pure enthusiasm you’ll stay til 7-8pm every night of the week on a normal period and you’ll pretty much live there when you’re in crunch time. This in the trenches mentality (a phrase literally built on the concept of being in the trenches during WWI) doesn’t get developed remotely and the cameraderie doesn’t get built remotely. Google and Facebook (to a much lesser degree than Google) also seem to really foster this idea that you should spend a ton of time working on your assignments, but you also should spend additional time just being so enthusiastic about your job and your company that you’re also working on inventive and creative stuff as well that might become future projects for the company.
By and large these companies don’t want people who have personal reasons to need to work from home full time. They don’t want people who are going to be upset about a long commute. To be honest (and this is a pretty common idea) they probably expect people to live close enough to their work place that the commute isn’t an issue. And if you don’t already, they expect you to move there.
All that being said, I think many jobs are well suited to 100% telecommuting. But I think the kind of company Meyer wants to make Yahoo! isn’t compatible with 100% telecommuters. Someone who is happy just wiling away as a DBA for 30 years really doesn’t need a lot of in person interaction, for example. Nor does a sys admin. I’d argue most HR people could avoid the office aside from certain “incidents” like interviews and etc where they have to come in face to face.
One of the big problems with developers telecommuting full time, is that developers rarely can just be given highly precise requirements and go from there. IBM and a lot of other big IT companies that specialize in really shitty forms of offshoring [this is really what IBM does btw, they get multi-billion dollar contracts where they take over IT function at a company and initially just hire the old IT staff from that company as IBMers. Over the next few years those people are reduced in number via “resource actions” and their function is moved to massive IBM centers located in Brazil, Argentina, and India. Once the functions are there many of the jobs are turned over not to the best and brightest from universities in those countries, but literally to high school level graduates who have been taught how to do a few tasks like monkeys. The results are not pretty and is why IBM has been sued multiple times now for multiple billions over their large IT contracts] like to push this concept that any IT person aside from hardware support can work anywhere and be just as effective. In the real world, especially in the large enterprise, that just almost never works out to being true for the enterprise.
Now, some individual teams of developers can keep in great contact with Skype and etc and build great software without ever meeting in the flesh. But you have a very high chance of getting a team like that in a small shop where that team has been built from the ground up. When it’s just tons of random people who decided to quit coming to work you’ll get some guys like that and you’ll also get people who are working a second job while “telecommuting” and earning two paychecks, or people that are passed out drunk in the living room floor at noon.
This is a good point, some people are going to excel in person and some cannot. Those who cannot are going to get stuck in their careers, but if they aren’t advancers who want to get advanced, it may not be bad for them to be telecommuters. But anyone interested in maximizing your chances of advancement: you need to go into the office. Studies have now shown telecommuters are much less likely to be awarded merit raises and promotions than in person workers.
As a side note, it’s also likely that telecommuters work less efficiently per hour, as it seems much of the productivity gains of telecommuters is that they tend to in practice work many more hours in a week than a non-telecommuter.
Right, and I think a sweet spot in bigger software companies would be an expectation that you work a few days a week at the office and have the option to work from home as needed and potentially consistently on a part time basis. You get the best of both worlds as you can hunker down in private to pound stuff out at home but get the interpersonal interactions that are essential to teambuilding for most people at the office.
It’s important to understand it isn’t always important that you function best at home. If you’re on a team of five people and two of you can be highly engaged working from home, but three can’t, it makes a lot more sense for all five of you to be in the office at least sometimes because a team needs all people to work together efficiently and effectively. It’s not ideal for the people who get more work done at home to negatively impact the team as a whole. A big problem with meshing the two types of people is anti-social telecommuters tend to like to communicate through email and instant messaging. The opposite of that tend to gloss over long detailed emails and might frequently be away from their desk or disinclined to pay much attention to an instant message conversation.
I doon’t know how true that would be. Google isn’t known as a company that buys into the concept of having “excessive meetings.” Most more modern software companies know a lot of the management concepts about over scheduling meetings. But the full time telecommuters will be expected to maintain interpersonal interactions, and for antisocial types that may be construed as “pointless meetings.”
Not a bad thing either. If Mayer wants a specific type of “team”, then it’s her job to work to create it.
This is what I’ve thought about her since she’s taken over. I imagine based on what I’ve heard, Yahoo! does have some operational problems that needed fixed. They might even benefit from being more like Google. One of the first things she did was start making the environment at the corporate offices more like Google, with more free stuff for the employees and all that. I think if you look at her history, she literally started as a young engineer at Google when it was a young company ands he saw it become a multibillion dollar behemoth. She’s probably smart and has a good idea how to run parts of the business, but I don’t see anything in her resume that makes me thinks she’s anything other than a really smart engineer who has seen one way a company can succeed.
As J.C. Penney is learning, you can’t just copy one company’s business model and paste it on top of an existing business and expect great results. Apple retail stores make a ton of money because they sell very, very desirable products. J.C. Penney made money because they sold cheap clothes and had a decent customer base of loyal shoppers who would eagerly wait for the big sales to go buy clothing. They were losing out to other retailers in this space like Belk, Elder-Beerman, and Kohl’s primarily because they were just being out-competed in the old school sense of the word. J.C. Penney needed better operational management, not someone who thought selling discount clothing was going to be improved by treating it like selling high-markup electronic toys.
Yahoo! right now is in a position where they could be significantly improved, and if they aren’t things could get ugly. On the bright side, they have almost $10bn in current assets, $7.5bn in cash. That’s money they need to spend trying to decide exactly what business Yahoo! is going to be in 5, 10, 15 years from now. Right now they are reaping profits from things that are going away, and have no long term business that I can see that can survive without the company significantly shrinking in size.
They need a new product, as you said, they don’t need to be ran more efficiently. Every company can benefit from it, but Yahoo is like the AOL before it was obvious AOL was going to become irrelevant. They have decent income from dying business lines and no serious initiatives on the horizon. Mayer can run the tightest ship in the world, but Yahoo! needs a product to drive new revenue. Everything else is just shuffling chairs on the deck.
I’m a full-time telecommuter, my job is software development, and I’ve been working productively for the company I work for for 12 years. There have been a few moments - that is, a FEW in 12 years - where I attended a meeting remotely and wished I was in the room with the others so I could see/use the whiteboard to visualize/illustrate the concept that was being discussed. The idea that breathing the same air as your co-workers is essential to collaborating on projects is mind-boggling to me. Occasionally, there are meetings where physical presence is beneficial. Otherwise, it’s just a waste of gasoline, toll money and commuting time, and having to prepare lunch in advance (or buy out) instead of being able to scrounge for leftovers when the mood strikes.
You can attend meetings from home, also. Many meetings I’ve been to over the past 15 years have been widely geographically distributed. However anyone who has been the one caller to a face-to-face meeting, or heard callers try to interact, knows it doesn’t work. Most conference rooms have lousy speakerphones (with the exception of those at Cisco) and it is hard for someone attending remotely to break into heated discussions. When everyone is on the phone it is better.
The only quibble I have is that people can goof off at home or in the office, and a decent manager can tell this. The telecommuting fans seem to see any opposition as accusations of laziness, but the real reasons you presented very well. As I said above, Google’s lack of interest in telecommuting is not because they think they hired losers.
I’m a full time teleworker processing health insurance claims, and I agree with alll of the above that there are different but still present productivity drains, tradeoffs to being in the office from a personal point of view. I was ambivalent for a long time but elected to take the offer to leave when it seemed all my friends in the office were leaving too.
My company has backed away. For a while managers and technical specialists were allowed to leave, but they were returned to the office so the only people currently allowed to work at home are auditors and processors.
Here’s how I see it:
Advantages to working at home: Can work in sweats (although we were allowed to wear jeans and T-shirts too the office.
Step out to do laundry while a slow report is coming back.
Allowed to have own coffeemaker.
Less car expenses, no commute time
Advantages to office:
Less utility expenses, computers and halogen lamp on in home office, need to keep heat turned up in winter at home
Easy supply of cooked food at cafeteria
Easier to just step over to someone’s desk to chat or resolve a problem.
Printer available (they’re scared of HIPAA so we’re not allowed to have anything that can produce hard copies at home).
For a while teleworkers were required to produce 110% of the norm, while in-office were required to produce 85%. Originally it was 85% for both, then they changed it, and now they’re changing it again to 100% both places.
Honestly, there really is little to no benefit to allowing your workforce to telecommute, other than it makes them happy. The company still has to pay all the infrastructure costs as if you were there, plus all the telecommuting infrastructure.
And I don’t believe that working from home makes you more productive. I mean for me, it doesn’t matter because 90% of my job is conference calls anyway. But there are a lot of distractions in most people’s homes.
I like having it available if I need to wait for a package or something, but really I don’t like working from home for long stretches of time. It makes me feel disconnected from my company and coworkers.
Well, from what I’ve seen companies have realized genuine cost savings from teleworking, I don’t think it’s true you have to maintain the same infrastructure from the ground up.
I also think there is a big difference between converting traditional office employees to teleworkers and building a team of teleworkers. One situation I’m familiar with, an older guy was a mainframe DBA for years and was basically someone who no one thought was moving up or in danger of losing his job, he was reliable and consistent but not looking for any big changes in his life. Due to some reshuffling at his company he ended up not being a full time employee of the company anymore and it ended up making more sense for him to retire and start collecting his pension from his previous employer and sign on with IBM to be a contractor basically doing his old job but drawing both a pension and pay from IBM.
Well, suddenly anytime someone needed him to do something, it became very hard to get his attention. Requests went unanswered for weeks, it was spotty at best to even get him on the phone. He ended up deciding to retire for real because he got some bad performance reviews and decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. Now this guy had a multiple-decades long history of being a reliable employee, but he just wasn’t suited to a work at home situation.
If you can assemble your team of teleworkers from the ground up, you can foster an environment where everyone is doing remote meetings and collaborating extensively using exclusively electronic methods. But if you’re working at the enterprise level it is highly unlikely the enterprise starts out as primarily telework, instead it’s going to be mostly standard office building with office workers in it. If you start to transition to telework, there are two different classes of communication. Communication between people in person, and “whatever they remember to communicate to the teleworkers.” Sometimes, it’s everything those teleworkers would ever need. But sometimes meetings and decision making sessions happen in person and on the fly, and maybe they don’t directly relate to the teleworkers but some of those teleworkers may be intimately knowledgeable of the system and have some very good reasons as to why a certain decision should or shouldn’t be made. However, since it’s an ad hoc meeting they are out of the loop, and may be out of the loop until things have travelled significantly down a path toward something that might actually be very bad for the company.
And it isn’t all just bad management of teleworking, the truth is it’s just plain hard to say “let’s never have human interactions here in the office, we need to make sure we setup a call to involve the teleworkers in every interaction and every decision.” That’s not the way normal human interactions take place. Anyone who needs to help with ideas and decisionmaking, I think it’s very, very questionable to make them 100% teleworkers.
As to why Yahoo! is in trouble business wise, it may not be immediately apparent just from their 10-Q/10-K. Yahoo! basically makes all of its revenue from Display and Search. Display are traditional internet display ads, they get a small amount of revenue per “impression.” This means the deals they can negotiate with advertisers and the number of impressions are key to this business. Display is big enough that if it tanks, the company is no longer profitable.
The problems with the display business are:
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Yahoo! as a web property has consistently lost market share in terms of its share of monthly web visitors. The smaller Yahoo’s share of that traffic the less advertisers are willing to pay Yahoo! to advertise with them, and as some of those numbers decrease in absolute and not just relative terms it means fewer total impressions as well.
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Display advertising as Yahoo! does it is not sophisticated to the degree alternative forms of advertising are. For example AdWords has a very well established system that generates a ton of revenue for Google because advertisers recognize AdWords is far more effective at targeting customers than anything Yahoo! has. Yahoo! ads are the equivalent of billboard space, which is fine, but Google advertisements are much more targeted. This perception makes the type of display advertising Yahoo! offers seem less valuable to advertisers, and this perception grows with time.
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While it’s a minor threat, over time there have been a decent amount of studies showing standard display advertising on the internet isn’t terribly effective or valuable. Some major companies have famously canceled a large portion of their online ad campaigns because of this. As old as the technology is, it isn’t as rigorously understood as traditional advertising, but it seems like every rigorous study of “dumb” (not targeted using a sophisticated algorithm) display advertising that comes out furthers the idea that it isn’t highly effective.
The second pillar of Yahoo! revenue is search. Yahoo! makes money through search sort of the same way Google does, but less effectively. They have affiliates and such that kick money back to Yahoo if someone clicks on their website through the Yahoo ad results and makes a purchase, for example. They also generate advertising revenue through search.
But the reality is, Microsoft has given Yahoo! a good bit of money to basically take over Yahoo! search with Bing. Part of this deal was “guaranteed minimum revenue” for Yahoo! from the search business. Basically, if the Yahoo! search business revenue was below X, Microsoft makes up the difference. Microsoft has made payments to Yahoo every quarter I believe since the deal was signed, showing that Yahoo’s search business is performing weakly and is being supplemented by an outside player. These deals with Microsoft are finitely termed, and over time Microsoft will no longer be required under the deal to make those payments. I also believe the ordinary revenue sharing under the search deal (which right now is basically piddling amounts to Microsoft with most going to Yahoo!) starts to become more equitable toward Microsoft, so overtime Yahoo! gets a smaller share and loses its guaranteed revenue payments from Microsoft.