So, the media is nattering on about "trend-setting Silicon Valley company Yahoo! doing away with telecommuting," and as Tim Berners-Lee is my witness, the first thought to flicker across my mind was "Yahoo! is still in business?" and I checked the browser on my iPad and, wow! They were!
I wonder if this applies to the whole Yahoo! empire, or if the GeoCities division offices are exempt?
(I see that Best Buy has decided to emulate them. Is this going to be a new thing for investors to keep an eye on? When all the rats are ordered to report back onto the ship, go short?)
to create a new culture of innovation and collaboration at the company, employees had to report to work.
ReplyDeleteThis has to be the most bizarre thing I've ever read. For people to be productive and basically earn the pay that they are given, they actually have to (gasp!) show up??? WHO'DA THUNK IT???
/sarc
I know people who "telecommute". I've read paeans to telecommuting on the web: it makes people happier and MORE productive. I'd say that this is true for SOME types of work and in moderate dosages. However, when people have carte blanche to sit at home while they "work", it's only reasonable to expect that they... won't.
Hadn't heard about Best Buy ditching the concept.
ReplyDeleteThese ladies got their start developing their concept at Best Buy: http://www.gorowe.com/
I guess the dream truly is dead. I first learned of the ROWE concept back in 2005 and had already done quite a bit of telecommuting before then but it was always frowned upon by many in whatever organization I was a part of.
I saw ROWE as the holy grail I would always covet but never find. I basically gave up ever finding it last year and have started more strongly defining the lines between on and off the clock. It seems I was ahead of the trend. I suppose we're not far enough removed from the industrial era after all.
The company I work for would not exist if not for telecommuting.
ReplyDeleteOur support techs live all over the world. I've been telecommuting 600 miles daily for over 17 years now...and all I have to do is get up and walk down the hall to my office.
Downside: I don't get snow days :)
Rub it in, Fuzzy, rub it in.
ReplyDeleteOur workforce is still too populated with worshippers of presenteeism and slackers for your situation to ever be more than the rare exception.
I'm also a 'remote' worker ... my boss and the rest of the team are on the other side of the country.
ReplyDeleteAt my last performance review I received "exceeding expectations" on most KPIs ("meeting expectations" on those) so I must be doing something right.
I like working from home (some days I am required to attend client sites so I'm not 100% at home, but I'm certainly not 'in the office' at all). I like being treated as an adult, expected to get the work done without having someone breathing down my neck.
There are downsides, of course, but on the whole I'm all in favour of this telecommuting thing.
As a person who still uses an email address which ends with @sbcglobal.net, I can confirm that Yahoo is still alive. It is harder to use nowadays as my email browser keeps trying to send me to att.com if I do something unusual, like try to log off and then back on as a different email address.
ReplyDeleteYahoo!
I read elsewhere that Mayer's reason for it was that the VPN was hardly being used. What she may be missing is that the VPN may be mostly unnecessary, or worse that it sucks so bad (like my company's) that it's more productive to work around it (making it not just unnecessary but an active impediment to productivity).
ReplyDeleteThe idea of determining how productive your remote workers are by how much they use the VPN is to me mind boggling.
Rob, not at all different from determining worker productivity based upon hours in the office.
ReplyDeleteIt's a 19th Century mentality but it seem to be here to stay.
And as long as I have my rant box open another annoyance to me is having my overall performance assessed on what you see for a random 30 seconds.
ReplyDeleteIf you walk up and I'm reading VFTP or whatever that doesn't mean it's the only thing I do all day.
In fact we code slingers are capable of noodling out a problem in one part of our mind while recreationally surfing with another. But if we do that we get treated as if we've abandoned our post on the assembly line.
Telecommuting is dead because the bright people are at home working, and the intelligence-challenged are the ones counting noses beside the grindstone like cheerful guards at the luftstalag.
ReplyDeleteWhen your boss and your boss' boss require an explanation of what you do and how you do it, and even then their eyes still glaze over, your days of telefreedom are numbered.
Exactly, Aesop. It requires trust on the part of the manager and accountability on the part of the employee.
ReplyDeleteBoth traits seem to be in short supply.
I worked in an environment that was mostly telecommuters. It sucked. There was a serious lack of teamwork, teams were constantly in conflict with each other and it was very disfunctional. My boss, who lived 10 minutes from the office couldn't even to be bothered to show up for team meetings even when the entire rest of the team was there in person, he just phoned it in.
ReplyDeleteSo, I'm generally not in favor of remote workers, but I have seen some situations, usually with extremely talented people, where it does work well.
Got a BIL who telecommutes. Been doing it for twenty years. He's a game designer for a company south of San Francisco. Probably 2-2.5 hr drive to the office, since they live a ways south of Carmel, on the coast. Got a new boss a while back, and now he has to be in the office at least one day a week, and they really want him every day.
ReplyDeleteMostly, I think what is going on with tele-com is when the economy gets tight, the upper level bosses want to feel more in control of the process. Jittery nerves, I guess.
Over here the feminists are screaming blue murder over this and Huffington requiring her employees to.. you know, work (start writing a book and you have to take a sabbatical or leave).
ReplyDeletehttp://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/26/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-memo-telecomute
It was all supposed to make the world so much nicer and fairer when women took over the in positions of power.
Well guess what? Equality reached! Women in business act just like men in business. Amazing how the single issue fanatics all get so upset when what they ask for turns out to be not quite what they imagined in their delusional dreams.
(For the record, not a poke at the ladies, as having worked for a long time in a female dominated profession I never needed to have the equality of ladies even suggested as an idea, but then I didn't expect them all to be angels either)
There is a recent Dilbert cartoon where the Pointy-Haired Boss (PHB) tells Dilbert that the new software will interrupt him every five minutes so that he will not get carpal tunnel syndrome. Dilbert laughingly responds by asking PHB if he was worried that the software will replace him. When PHB states that he doesn't get why that is funny, Dilbert responds that is why it is funny.
ReplyDeleteSome managers only think that you are working hard if they can directly observe you working hard while they are performing "management by walking around". Telecommuting makes that difficult for some managers, even when you are meeting and exceeding expected goals. If you are in the restroom when they come by your cubicle to check up on you, then for all they know you have left for the day. It is all about control, not necessarily results (sound familiar?).
There is a business axiom that states that if you need something within a week, send an e-mail, within a day, make a phone call (voicemail is no better than e-mail for the demand timeline), within an hour, see the person face-to-face. Telecommuting diminishes the ability to get things within the hour for those who cannot plan ahead.
BTW I used to work for a company that encouraged telecommuting (both occasional and up to 90%) by subsidizing the purchase of computers equipped with modems, monitors, printers and software by paying the employees back over a few years for the purchase, up to a maximum amount. The ability to telecommute was used as a recruiting enticement, but did not work well for some managers that insisted on micromanaging.
As someone with a Yahoo.co.uk email address, I can confirm that indeed, they are still going. I can also confirm that the comments section of their news-feed rivals that of YouTube as the apex of ignorance, intolerance, meanness and faeces-flinging. Seriously, never before, in the field of human communication, has so little been known, by so many, about so much.
ReplyDeleteThere must be a factory somewhere, just forging stupidity into weighty ingots, then slamming these ingots through the skulls of Yahoo! readers and setting them loose in the wild. And they're all out there, sitting on juries, voting, reproducing, operating heavy machinery...
Funny, one of my email programs is Yahoo. Used to get news feeds, but just a couple days ago I wanted to look for something on the news, and couldn't find any way to access from my program. Realized it's been years since I've seen yahoo news. Maybe they gave up on me :)
ReplyDeleteInteresting tie in between the kerfuffle with Yahoo and the Homeschooling Movement. http://homeschooling.penelopetrunk.com/2013/03/05/the-hoopla-about-marissa-mayer-is-really-a-homeschool-issue/
ReplyDeleteIt's probably a lot more efficient to have all of their people working in the locations where Yahoo is actually used rather than having them spread out all over the place.
ReplyDeleteIn the days before cell phones and telecommuting my boss always got upset when he would occasionally walk past my cave and finding me sitting with my feet on my desk staring out the window at the empty dirt lot behind us while spinning a pencil through my fingers, or playing solitare or mine sweeper. He would sarcastically ask if I was working? My standard response was "I was until you interrupted." Which always pissed him off.
ReplyDeleteThen one day we were in the middle of a 3 hour drive back to the office from an offsite meeting where we had found out that the project we were working on was going to slip it's schedule almost 4 months because of a design problem. I spent the first hour of the trip playing solitare on his old portable mac. While he tried to figure out how he was going to explain this huge screwup to our customers. When the battery started dying I shut the computer and just stared out the window while he carried on a one way conversation with me that I was ignoring.
Suddenly I grabbed our draawing package out of the back seat and started madly scribbling some ideas on it. Exercied my calculator a bit and then snapped at him to get off the damned road and find me a pay phone. He finally pulled over, next to a pay phone, I made a call back to the other engineers - we argued for about an hour on the boss's charge card, and when I got back into the car the other engineers were working on a new fix for the problem, the project was back on schedule and my boss never again complained about catching me playing solitare or just staring out the window again.
The woman I now refer to as the Semi-Sweety is allowed, nay encouraged to tele-commute. She works as a draftsman at an engineering firm, and is one of the most conscientious people I know, of either sex. She gets really pissed if people send her personal emails/texts/phone calls at work, and though her employers allow her access to the entire 'net on her work machine, she only uses that as necessary for her job, unlike some people we all know. (as in, bloggers posting from work)
ReplyDeleteP.s. She got fed up and quit when another (incompetent) woman was gaming the system to get ahead. Shortly thereafter, she was hired back at greater pay, after being assured they had fired that scheming bitch. You gotta love engineers; they are the only honest people in business.