Are you rethinking your telecommuting policy? Last week, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer issued an edict: No more telecommuting. Fly back to the office, little birds.
My colleague Alison Diana said the decision "could be Mayer's Waterloo." She quotes from an internal memo by Yahoo HR:
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.
There are two schools of thought on this decision:
It's a fiasco. Removing the option to telecommute will drive away Yahoo's best people and leave only poor performers behind. Here in the 21st century, collaboration is just as easy with people workiing remotely as it is with people working physically side by side -- particularly with tools for cloud and social business. And it's especially shameful for the CEO of an Internet company to be making this kind of edict.
It's a good decision. Yahoo's culture is horrendously broken, and a kick in the pants is needed to fix it. Mayer's decision is just that kick.
We want to know what you think. And we want to know what you think of telecommuting in your organization. Take our poll and let us know. How does your organization treat telecommuting? Is it permitted? Forbidden? Permitted only in special cases? Let us know in the comments here or under that poll.
I'm an outlier. I've telecommuted nearly all of the past 21 years.
Hasn't hurt my productivity any. I don't have any problems being tempted to slack off. My problems go in the opposite direction: I'm tempted to come back to my desk for more work.
I work for a retail company and intially when I started about 6 years ago, telecommuting was only a option if you have a special case like a sick child at home. But in the past two years, the company has invested in some of the latest technology trends and tools to make it easier to work remotely so telemcommuting is now welcomed and highly encouraged in certain departments such as IT.
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