This right here is enough to say sorry folks you’ve fucked yourselves, Mayer’s not being a bitch you guys ARE NOT WORKING. Telecommuting isn’t a right - yes a lot of the tech companies do it but some still don’t, they like their people to interface - so if you don’t like the policy look for another job. :dubious:
It would still be nice if she threw in a childcare center. I really think more companies overall should do that anyway. I have known of multiple people who have quit working because financially it made sense for them to stay home after having children because childcare is so expensive.
As has been cited, the employees weren’t logging in, demostrating their lack of value to the company. What would have been heavy-handed is dismissing all the slackers based on the logs showing Yahoo wasn’t getting what they paid them for - work.
And really, there was no way people weren’t going to gripe - people hate change, period. There’s no higher ideal here, nothing about fairness, it’s just some people grousing that things aren’t going their way.
Wouldn’t the even less heavy-handed approach be to evaluate telecommuting employees on a individual basis? I assume that there were some who did real work remotely. And perhaps others who did work locally on their notebook systems without establishing a VPN connection?
This approach is always brought out but it’s unworkable from a management perspective - it takes you from managing to micro-managing, shepherding a group to watching every single individual every day. It’s not just checking the VPN logs daily, it’s discussing those logs every single time someone’s numbers drop in order to be consistent. It’s a hassle for management, and it sucks for morale over the long term. This is a one-time hit to employee satisfaction numbers, after which some will adapt and some will move on.
If you can’t tell whether your employees are getting work done or not, you’re not capable of being a manager. It doesn’t matter if they’re working.remotely or in-house. You have to be able to understand what their doing well enough to be able to evaluate their performance.
Ok, so there’s also a problem with low and mid level Yahoo managers.
As far as we can determine, Mayer evaluated the issue and made a decision based on a perceived problem. She may also have to deal with those low/mid level managers.
How does this make it an arbitrary, capricious, or bitchy decision on her part, which is how a lot of people are describing the situation?
'Bout time Yahoos got a real job. Allowing most of a company to telecommute is just a road to the kind of sloth, indifference and loss of direction that characterizes Yahoo.
Selected employees in selected conditions and in limited ways? Sure. But “work from home” as a rule? Right.
Maybe or maybe not. I had three employees until recently, then reorganized and have two. They were new employees to me - I’d come in from outside, so I had very little idea what they did. In addition to “managing” I also had a lot of responsibilities as an individual contributor. I hate micro managing, and I hate being micro managed, so I wasn’t looking over their shoulders.
So when Employee One took longer than I would have writing up some documentation for me - did that mean that she was slacking or that I turn around documentation fast while she finds it difficult? (I know I turn around documentation quickly, its a strength of mine) When Employee Two took a long time with reconciliations I didn’t understand, was that because she was dilly dallying, or that something that takes months to master for which she had specific subject matter expertise (I did have a high level understanding of it) was hard. (No pointy haired boss here, “I don’t understand it, it must be easy.”) ? Employee Three was a lot like me, similar strengths - much less experience (like twenty years less) but I could judge his output better.
Now, with the three of them sitting in my same area, I was pretty sure they weren’t spending all day on Facebook (or the SDMB) - i.e. whether they were scamming me or if they simply had the common sense to look busy. But when people are working from home, you really don’t know - “did this documentation take four hours because they were struggling with how to put it together, or did this documentation take four hours because it took one hour and then there was three hours of World of Warcraft?”
In my experience, corporate culture tends to stagnate. It could be that the employees were meeting expectations, but those expectations were out of date. No one’s going to the boss and saying “hey, I could knock out twice as much as you’re assigning me.” You’re making your numbers, the manager’s team is making their numbers, no one says anything. And if someone says something, no one wants to hear it.
As a corporate vp, I’ve been in this position. I did two proposals in the last 10 years recommending we raise our productivity expectations and downsize staff, and it was seen as risky and overly-aggressive. We merged with another company and it was discovered they were twice as productive as us in the same area, so after the merger our department was wiped and the work given to their people, and the higher-ups are looking at us like “no one noticed this?” :smack:
I can almost guarantee that someone knew telecommuting wasn’t working long before this and was told don’t rock the boat.
I spent years at my last firm recommending the we centralize functionality and lay off the people out at sites who had a job doing what was just as easy to do centrally, easier - and gain the efficiencies of scale - but we didn’t want to lay people off - even though we KNEW we could do it with half the people if we centralized it. (See. corporations are not uniformly out to screw employees - we KNEW we could do it cheaper, but these people depended on us for their jobs).
When the company almost went under, we looked for every efficiency we could to survive and had to lay off staff - we centralized it and you know what - we did it with 30% of the staff, all our of the low labor cost Far East.
Believe it or not, managers don’t really like telling employees “I think you could get more done.” Or “I need you to be more productive.” Because once you play that card, if there isn’t a response the next step is a performance improvement plan for 60 days, followed by letting them go, followed by six months to rehire them. Its nine months of lost productivity - you don’t do that for a 30% gain in productivity unless you HAVE to.
Two of my three former employees were very content to sit in the desks they were sitting in and push the same paper they’d been pushing for their salary. They didn’t want to push MORE paper. They didn’t want change that might risk their jobs. They didn’t want to get promoted and they knew that raises had been frozen for years. So they held all the cards except me saying “pack up your desk.” And “pack up your desk” means that I don’t get the jobs they were getting done done for half a year.
I think your common about “having the common sense to look busy” is really true. I’ve worked in offices, and I’ve telecommuted. Both offer equal opportunity for slacking off in my experience. Now, there are definitely some personality types who have a harder time working from home, and (conversely) there are people who have a harder time working in an office. But I think the common assumption that working at home is next to impossible for most people is really untrue; most people I know who get to work from home are so glad for the opportunity that they wouldn’t do anything to screw it up.
I’ve known people who were stellar work from homes employees, and people who were really bad at it, either intentionally or because it wasn’t a good fit. It isn’t a good fit for me. I’m too distracted, so I only do it when weather or kids would have turned it into a no work day.
Your options for slacking off are more dimensional at home. Netflix movies. Video games. And then the responsibilities of the house..kids, dishes, laundry. And just leaving for the day, we fired a guys who didn’t even bother to be home, much less work, when we worked from home.
Well, see, I think that’s why it wasn’t a good fit for you (and others). I have all those things, and honestly, they don’t distract me at all when I’m supposed to be working. Whereas in the office, I have a much harder time avoiding the people wandering into my office with a “work question” then staying for 45 minutes yammering about their weekend (or whatever), or feeling antsy and wishing I was away from my computer so screwing around with email/web surfing, or going to talk to my work buddy and shooting the shit for an hour.
Movies? Games? Housework? Not an issue. I get bored during the day if I’m stuck at home without actual work to do, I know this from experience. I set my daily/weekly goals, usually meet them, and my clients are happy with my performance. I’m happy not to have to go into an office. Win-win. Not for everyone, but I’m far from alone in not having motivational issues with working from home.
I agree that telecommuting isn’t right for all workers and all circumstances, but IMH- and-completely-non-business-leadership-O, I think a better choice would have been to leave it to workers and their direct supervisors. If you and your boss agree to it, you should be able to go ahead and telecommute, because nobody should have a better sense of what kind of worker you are.
I’m likewise dubious ( :dubious: ). What, if anything, does the duration of VPN sessions tell you? The best software developer I have ever met, bar none, hardly ever sat in front of a computer or terminal. He did most of his work with mechanical pencils and graph paper. He’s also one of the most professional and hardworking people I know.
