Yahoos.
That?s how corporate Yahoo likes to refer to its staff members, but when I was growing up in the South, being called a ?yahoo? wasn?t a compliment. Somewhere between a flake and a yokel is how I?d have defined it, if asked ? a hapless fool, a few steps behind the rest.
That?s presumably what employees who had flexible work agreements with Yahoo feel like today, as they contemplate the internal memo to employees from its human resources department. Read it in full at All Things D, but here?s the gist:
To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo, and that starts with physically being together.
Beginning in June, we?re asking all employees with work-from-home arrangements to work in Yahoo offices. If this impacts you, your management has already been in touch with next steps. And, for the rest of us who occasionally have to stay home for the cable guy, please use your best judgment in the spirit of collaboration. Being a Yahoo isn?t just about your day-to-day job, it is about the interactions and experiences that are only possible in our offices.
Marissa Mayer must have anticipated the storm of criticism that would follow as the country?s most visible dual player in both the chief executive and mother roles, a C.E.O. many had hoped would forge new ground in the intersection between work and family. Instead, she has apparently taken away workplace flexibility formally, and even grasped at that beloved perk of the white-collar job: the ability to wait at home for the cable guy.
Why? Research has found that both men (PDF) and women want workplace flexibility, and both are more satisfied when workplaces have flexible policies in place. Employers often assume that workers offered workplace flexibility will take advantage of it in the negative sense; but research, again, hasn?t supported (PDF) that assumption. In fact, in a study (PDF) published the same day as Yahoo issued its memo (but which was widely reported earlier), call center employees at a company in China randomly assigned to work from home were both more efficient and more satisfied.
All of this has been said before, and can?t be unknown to Yahoo, which presumably has its reasons for eliminating full-time work-from-home positions ? among them, perhaps, appealing to Wall Street. The new policy is already getting some favorable reviews in the business press.
But it is the one-size-fits-all subtext of the memo ? Kara Swisher of All Things D reports that ?numerous sources told me that the decree extends to any staffers who might have arrangements to work from home just one or two days a week,? and that ?one top manager was told that there would be little flexibility on the issue? ? that?s disturbing, and even more than that, it?s the memo?s presumed source.
Many parents hoped for better things from Ms. Mayer, who persuaded Yahoo to hire her while pregnant. And while she doesn?t seem to have missed a beat after the birth of her young son, she presumably has a solid understanding that family life comes with unexpected demands. Those unexpected demands are cushioned by the presence of a staff for someone like Ms. Mayer, but for most parents, they?re not entirely absorbed ? and Ms. Mayer is clearly intelligent enough to know that not everyone can have the house manager wait for the delivery of the new water heater.
If offering full-time work from home positions doesn?t work for Yahoo, so be it. But in so adamantly pulling even the simplest uses of flextime off the table, Ms. Mayer is letting the side down ? and by side, I don?t mean women and mothers. I mean every parent who has ever left a sick child watching television with a phone and a set of numbers on the coffee table, and every adult child who has left a parent in a doctor?s office awaiting test results while rushing back to work.
Of late, as the conversation has shifted to one of workplace balance for all; as men have joined in, as high-profile workplaces like McKinsey have begun to recruit women who left to start families back to the fold, it has felt like things were beginning to change for working families. Yahoo?s tone-deaf memo isn?t just a blow to flextime and to working parents. It?s a move in the wrong direction by someone who might have led her company the other way, and while that move would have been just as wrongheaded coming from a male C.E.O., it would have felt more like business as usual and less like business going backward.
Source: http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/25/yahoos-blow-to-work-family-balance/
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