Work from home isn’t the only option for flexibility
In this guest posting, Julie Dormand ponders the wisdom of the decision made by Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer to scrap its work from home policy.
Wow. Hasn’t Marissa Mayer set the “f” word debate on fire?
Is it good for companies or bad? Good for employees or not? The cost of doing business in the technological age or a perk that has run its course?
It seems that anything Ms Mayer does ends up under the spotlight and trending on Twitter, but the flexibility issue definitely deserves attention. Not least of all because at the same time, our own federal government is using flexibility as a policy platform for reelection later this year.
I am an advocate for flexibility in the workplace, in many forms and wherever it is possible.
It’s easy to think that we have a difficult industry to allow for flexibility and in a way that’s true, especially when it comes to client service and the need to leap out of your chair and into a client meeting at the drop of a hat. Yahoo! has also made a valid point about the value of incidental meetings and conversations between colleagues that fuel innovation and creativity.
But it’s also true that the star performers of our industry are very hard to keep, and by trying to be as flexible as possible we are able to save a small fortune on recruitment, training and development costs, as well as maintain continuity for our clients’ business, which is hard to put a dollar value on.
We recognise our star performers are not just mums and dads, and our broader flexibility policies reflect that.
For parents and carers, often the best approach is to shift “office hours” to start earlier or finish later to allow for time with the children or daycare pickup, for example. We allow staff to take time off outside the traditional “lunch hour” to attend the gym or the dentist. At the moment, our receptionist is bringing her new puppy to work to ensure he has consistent training.
We also have a Time Out policy which extends the spirit of flexibility to the entire staff. Time Out acknowledges that a person might need to leave full time work to do something else for a fixed period of time – so far, we have staffers who have taken Time Out to work on a horse ranch, take an extended honeymoon, and undertake a course of study. Once the time is up, the person can return to their job, their colleagues and their clients.
All of these are great people who would have quit had it not been for the Time Out option.
Meanwhile, while Mayer and Yahoo! have stated in response to the leaked memo cancelling their work-from-home policy, their decision is not “a broad industry view on working from home,” clearly the actions of such a high-profile organisation are going to influence the way other organisations and industries approach flexibility.
What is also clear from our experience and the leaked memos is that all employees within a company need to be involved with, and buy into, flexible working practices so that it works for everyone while ensuring that company objectives are still achieved.
Julie Dormand is the managing director of MercerBell
Julie, guessed you missed this?
Last week, Yahoo banned employees from working from home.
How did CEO Marissa Mayer decide to make such a controversial decision?
According to a source, the only way Mayer is comfortable making any decision: with the help of data.
Like a lot of companies, Yahoo has something called a Virtual Private Network or VPN. Remote workers can use it to securely log into Yahoo’s network and do work.
(LifeHacker has a really good explanation of what a VPN is.)
After spending months frustrated at how empty Yahoo parking lots were, Mayer consulted Yahoo’s VPN logs to see if remote employees were checking in enough.
Mayer discovered they were not — and her decision was made.
Kara Swisher first reported the news that Mayer was showing executives Yahoo’s VPN logs to justify her work-from-home ban.
Mayer is famously obsessed with metrics and data.
Once, a Google designer quit the company in a huff because he was tired of how Mayer, in charge of how Google.com homepage looked, would choose design elements like color or font not based on taste, but raw data.
For every design variable, she looked at how users interacted with Google with one design — and then the other.
If the data showed users were using Google.com faster one way instead of the other, that particular design choice won out.
It’s hard to argue that Mayer’s process didn’t work for Google. It was not the first search engine on the market, but it’s just about the only one anybody uses now.
Likewise, we’re hearing from people close to Yahoo executives and employees that she made the right decision banning work from home.
“The employees at Yahoo are thrilled,” says one source close to the company.
“There isn’t massive uprising. The truth is, they’ve all been pissed off that people haven’t been working.”
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com.....z2NYPCO1UX
User ID not verified.
Giving the circumstances of Yahoo, Marissa had to make the tough call in order to build a strong culture. Technologie companies’ culture make or break their success. Look at the four horseman (Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple), they all have really defined culture. In contrast, Yahoo is almost seen as this back up option when top talent is looking for work.
It’s hard to build a culture when you employees are not at once place, this is just as true for agencies. Both industry heavily relies on top talent and the interaction between people. It’s OK to have your employees to work from home when you have already got a strong culture, and things are going well. But not so much when you have to rally the troops together, and make drastic improvements.
So even though the decision may seem controversial, I don’t think we should jump to any fast jugements. Good on her for making the tough calls, and that this a CEO Yahoo needs right now.
User ID not verified.