Why Five Days in the Office Is Too Many

FOR most of my professional life, I have worked from home. The freedom
to work outside a traditional office was one of the main reasons I
left the corporate world eight years ago, at age 23, to start a
software company.

The idea that all employees should sit in the same place for eight
hours a day, five days a week, seemed maddeningly inefficient to me. I
knew that I was at peak productivity at certain times throughout the
day, with regular lulls in between. The flexibility to determine when
and where I worked made me a better worker.

But as my company grew, something surprising happened: I started to
feel the pull of the office. As an employee, I still had little desire
to spend all of my day there. As an employer, however, I wanted to
ensure that my employees were working efficiently. Requiring everyone
to be in the office for at least part of the week seemed the easiest
way to do that. I also saw the value of the conversations that arose
when people were physically together in a room.

When I heard last week that Marissa Mayer, Yahoo's chief executive,
was banning its employees from working at home, my first thought was,
"I'm glad I don't work at Yahoo." But I also understood why she felt
compelled to enact the policy, at least for now. She is in charge of a
huge company that is known for its bloat. This may be exactly what
Yahoo needs to get back on track. The question is whether the policy
will improve productivity in the long run.

The idea that everyone must be in the office five days a week harks
back to a time when workers didn't have the proper tools to work from
home. But we live in a very different world today. Given that
technology has made employees accessible around the clock, and that
they are often expected to work after hours, the traditional 40-hour
schedule is in many ways an anachronism.

Yahoo argued in a memo announcing its new policy that "some of the
best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria
discussions, meeting new people and impromptu team meetings." That is
certainly true. But it is also the case that some of the most creative
insights come only when you give the human brain unstructured time to
think. Opportunities for such freewheeling thought rarely present
themselves amid the hustle and bustle of daily office life.

IN today's world, where we are constantly connected, the office should
be reconceived as a gathering place to communicate ideas and to
reinforce personal bonds. Beyond that, employees should be given the
respect, and the responsibility, to manage their own schedules and
complete their work on their own time, from wherever they choose. This
is the principle we followed in my business, called Khush. We came to
the office three days a week for five hours a day, starting around
noon.

In 2011, a larger app company, Smule Inc., acquired us, and I learned
that complexity grows along with the size of a team. Communication is
an ever-bigger challenge. Details can be overlooked. Opportunities for
spontaneous collaboration can be missed and the best of intentions
misunderstood.

And yet, regardless of a company's size, the fundamentals of
productivity do not change. Smart people still work best when they can
choose when and where they are working. Such flexibility also helps
employees who are parents. Some of our employees take a break in the
afternoon to pick up their children from school, then come back to
finish their work. And the work always gets done on time.

Smule was already fairly flexible about scheduling, asking its
employees to work a minimum of five hours a day, four days a week, in
the office. Recently, as our businesses merged more fully, the company
asked the employees from Khush to switch to Smule's schedule. But
instead, I persuaded Smule's C.E.O. to switch all employees to the
three-day-a-week minimum that my company had maintained. He agreed to
the change even though he had reservations about it — he is a big
believer in face time.

I think this policy comes closest to a middle ground that satisfies
the needs of both employers and employees. Rather than leaning on
organizational principles designed for an older time, companies should
collectively develop new strategies to remove the remaining challenges
to working from home.

Prerna Gupta is chief product officer at Smule Inc., a music app
developer that in 2011 bought Khush, the company she co-founded.
nytimes