Superwoman and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has sparked off a touchy debate
by her new rule that doesn't permit employees to work from home. If
not implicitly, Mayer has not-so-subtly implied that she thinks
employees working from home are largely goofing off and that they'd be
far more productive if they came to office everyday. God help those
thousands of employees, if Mayer is planning a work ethic based on her
own formidable standards. This is a woman who, after getting a
computer science degree, specialised in artificial intelligence, and
can take credit for Google's famous, unembellished homepage. She's
clearly not working for money; Mayer already has $300 million in the
bank and is in the Fortune list of top 20 tech people in the world.
But it's not her qualifications or illustrious career, rather the fact
that she took a two-week maternity leave, which makes me think that
Mayer's actually Supergirl, masquerading as one of us lesser mortals.
Naturally, she's not going to see any reason why people need more
flexibility in their work lives. But most of us are not like her who
can effortlessly raise kids and head a listed company while giving
quotes like: "I don't need much sleep".
The uncomfortable truth is: Mayer is right. Unless you really have a
Zen approach and you've trained yourself to switch gears remarkably
efficiently between household chores and making spreadsheets, working
from home is more like a Utopian fantasy that never quite works out.
Of course, I'm not talking about the rare and extremely motivated
sort, or somebody with the staggering talent of Leo Tolstoy (he was
writing while fighting as a soldier during the Crimean War). I'm
talking about the regular qualified employee with specific tasks and
deadlines. People argue that technology makes it possible for them to
work just as efficiently from anywhere, and while that's perfectly
true, work can't just be condensed into efficiency. It's as much about
bouncing off new and creative ideas with colleagues, coffee breaks and
no matter how pointless statistics says daily meetings are, they are
imperative to keep lines of communication between co-workers open.
Facetime and Skype are just not the same thing.
Maybe it's a little unfair to bracket every working-from-home employee
as a lucky goofball because people thrive under different work
conditions. I can only speak for myself and my work requires a lot of
self-motivation and distraction-free time. Working at home isn't for
me since I'm distracted even by the word distraction. On the days I'm
attempting to work at home, I end up watching Gossip Girl and trying
to find myself something interesting to eat. Before I know it, the
day's over and I'm feeling guilty and more than a little frustrated. I
find I achieve much more on days I go into my office and have some
entirely meaningless conversations with two colleagues.
But it's also true that many women drop out of the workforce because
of inflexible rules that require them to clock in daily. Juggling a
career with family responsibilities keeps getting harder. Eventually,
companies will have to arrive at a happy medium between working in the
office and from home. With the Earth's fledging natural resources, it
is very silly to insist that people waste petrol to commute an hour to
do what they could from home. I suspect a day is not far off when we
have permanent Skype on, and we can watch and have conversations with
colleagues in real time, a sort of virtual office, with large TV
screens, or such simulations much better than the ones currently
available. Technology will ensure we can almost physically be
together, while being apart. Till then, it's got to be innovation the
old-fashioned way: in conference rooms or cubicles.
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