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.
FE
Showing posts with label work from home yahoo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label work from home yahoo. Show all posts
Wednesday, 6 March 2013
Tuesday, 5 March 2013
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
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
How Marissa Mayer Figured Out Work-At-Home Yahoos Were Slacking Off
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.
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.
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."
businessinsider
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.
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.
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."
businessinsider
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