Yahoo Ends ‘Working from Home’ Option

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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According to a leaked internal memo sent to company employees, workers who have opted to work from home will no longer be afforded that privilege and are being permanently recalled back to the office. Employees who choose not to comply with the new directive are cordially invited to seek employment elsewhere. Wow, tough love. :eek:

The changes begin in June, according to the Yahoo memo. After that, employees who work from home must comply without exception or quit. One top manager was told that there would be little flexibility on the issue.
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I thought tech companies are supposed to be forward-thinking? I'm curious what metrics were used to determine that working from home = less productivity. If someone isn't pulling the load, then you replace them with someone who will.
 
I'd be surprised if they proved that working from home made people less productive. More likely it's that people who ARE less productive choose to work from home.
 
dunno about others work ethics -- I'm the kind of guy that will get his job done quickly and efficiently if I'm at home.

No office poiltics
No wasting time BS'ing people you dislike or hate
No wasted time/energy/gas to get ready or fight traffic.
Better morale

If I was doing a bang up job from the comfort of my home - forced to come into the office, I'd already be pissed off, and i guarentee you I wouldn't be working near as hard.


Add to that all the back end expenses of having an office full of people, more electricity, heating/cooling, tech support, office supplies.

It's like they do the exact opposite of what they should be doing... every time.
 
I work at a big bank and we're so spread out around the globe that it's impossible for all the people that people work with day to day to be in one location anyway and we have a pretty liberal work from home policy though even we have tightened that up recently. Though I've not seen anything officially, I think working from home is becoming less and less popular with companies though I don't know if it is because of productivity or quality declines or management phobias or something else.
 
Managers need people to belittle and yell at to make themselves fell better!
 
I'm a risk manager and work from home. I've been doing this for 3 years and prior to that, I worked in an office environment for 10 years. I'm twice as productive working at home as I am at an office for one simple fact: I can work anytime I wish and am not splitting time between home life and work life. If I need to get some extra work done after the kids are asleep and the wife is asleep, no problem, walk 15' to my office and go at it. It's not uncommon for me to send business emails time stamped midnight or later and I've actually been chided about it. The mornings are where you have to be motivated and disciplined. For me, I get up at my normal time, drink my coffee while browsing the internet, and am in my chair in business attire by 8:00am everyday. Some people may be able to work in their boxers and tshirts, but that ain't me.

No doubt about it, you have to be disciplined enough to do it, but working from home is the shiznit.
 
The problem with work at home jobs is there needs to be some standard by which one should say how much work actually should be done in a given work week. I wouldn't be surprised if there's lots of wasted man-hours at home due to people fucking around.
 
sfsuphysics said:
The problem with work at home jobs is there needs to be some standard by which one should say how much work actually should be done in a given work week. I wouldn't be surprised if there's lots of wasted man-hours at home due to people fucking around.
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No different then at the work place :)
 
sfsuphysics said:
The problem with work at home jobs is there needs to be some standard by which one should say how much work actually should be done in a given work week. I wouldn't be surprised if there's lots of wasted man-hours at home due to people fucking around.
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westrock2000 said:
No different then at the work place :)
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Exactly. I deal with a lot of folks in Asia, so working at home is just the nature of the business as no one expects us to be in the office at 2 AM working with folks over there and then come in at 9 AM and then be there until 5 PM. The trick is to be productive and flexible.

If I had an office that didn't have to deal with a global workforce and dealing were local or at least within a reasonable number of time zones, I probably wouldn't be much into the work at home thing either. But you can't pay top dollar for top talent you do have to fine other ways to incentivize the staff and working from home is a BIG way to do that without extra direct financial compensation.
 
I have the option to work from home a certain number of days a week. I choose not to as logging in over our VPN is painfully slow. Processes that take 30 seconds to a minute to setup in the office take 5-10 minutes at home. Multiply that out over the course of a full work day and you end up being terribly inefficient.

I can't speak to the experience at yahoo, but if it is anything like mine it is no great loss.
 
Silentbob343 said:
I have the option to work from home a certain number of days a week. I choose not to as logging in over our VPN is painfully slow. Processes that take 30 seconds to a minute to setup in the office take 5-10 minutes at home. Multiply that out over the course of a full work day and you end up being terribly inefficient.

I can't speak to the experience at yahoo, but if it is anything like mine it is no great loss.
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This used to be the case when I first started with the bank and the cable modem speed I had back in 2006. Now it's almost like being in the office as both the VPN and my cable modem speeds have improve tremendously.
 
My job is largely done from a computer. At work I have a shit computer bogged down with encryption and every other piece of shit they could find to install on it. All the services (email, work requests) are available on the internet. I get a hell of a lot more work done at home than at work.

What is with old fucks and not understand the loss of productivity by terrible technology standards within the company?
 
mrtheshaggy said:
My job is largely done from a computer. At work I have a shit computer bogged down with encryption and every other piece of shit they could find to install on it. All the services (email, work requests) are available on the internet. I get a hell of a lot more work done at home than at work.

What is with old fucks and not understand the loss of productivity by terrible technology standards within the company?
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I would love to use my hardware for work but that's pretty much taboo at banks these days, at least the big ones, never have worked at a smaller bank.
 
I do 100% of my job at my desk with phone and computer but our company does not allow us to work from home though employees in other departments can. I live about a mile from work so its not that big of a deal, but I would much rather work from home. I do not feel that I would be less productive. I would probably be more productive as I would be more concerned my boss would feel I was being less productive just because I was working at home. Unfortunately I know for a fact that at least a handful of my co-workers would slack off all day, primarily because they slack off all day while in the office anyway. At least by having them in the office someone can come by and catch them in the act. I'm not really that much of a people person so working at home would certainly lower how much energy I have to exert mentally by being social.
 
In a company like Yahoo, the bulk of WAH people are likely cutomer facing - customer service, billing support, etc. It's not hard to measure if those employees are doing their job or not - As a customer facing person, you generally have metrics to meet, which are not flexible between WAH and in office - all employees doing customer service would be expected to meet the same metrics.

Assuming that the bulk of WAH is customer facing, I would only venture then to assume that they have looked at it and for one reason or another, home workers are not measuring up. Or, maybe they have a higher turnover rate for WAH vs in office, which could be tied to not meeting metrics, which would then raise cost as they have to train a new person...

Just a guess, but seems somewhat plausible.
 
my last job i could work form home some days but my one boss hated us to do it. i had hard numbers backing up my claim that i was more productive working from home each day compared to coming in the office. He still didnt like us working from home but the rest of the company could
 
I could understand a requirement for upper management or top level engineers being forced to go into work as a majority of their work is entirely team based. I don't see any need for the "drone" like jobs to be done at any office and it seems that's who this new provision is targeting.

Questionable move in my opinion - especially for a global company.
 
I work tech support in a company that operates completely on the premise of office politics. Every major to minor decision is made by tie wearing asshats with absolutely no exposure to the company or working environment, and done purely at their whim and present mood. I guarantee a decision like this was spearheaded by some cranky executives who simply didnt like the idea of people sitting in their bathrobes drinking coffee working from home. It probably just bothered them on some personal level, at which they felt something must be wrong, that productivity must be working because "ghast, how can people work if not chained to a cubicle doing my bidding! How can people work effectively without my tyrannical presence" and most importantly "how am I able to justify my salary when I have nobody to boss around, and the company is operating autonomously without any input from my behalf!".
 
McFry said:
I work tech support in a company that operates completely on the premise of office politics. Every major to minor decision is made by tie wearing asshats with absolutely no exposure to the company or working environment, and done purely at their whim and present mood. I guarantee a decision like this was spearheaded by some cranky executives who simply didnt like the idea of people sitting in their bathrobes drinking coffee working from home. It probably just bothered them on some personal level, at which they felt something must be wrong, that productivity must be working because "ghast, how can people work if not chained to a cubicle doing my bidding! How can people work effectively without my tyrannical presence" and most importantly "how am I able to justify my salary when I have nobody to boss around, and the company is operating autonomously without any input from my behalf!".
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Well this stuff does happen there are lots of other considerations too. There are concepts like accidental discovery and shop floor innovation that do not happen nearly as often or at all when people work from home. Also many of us know of tons of guys who should just strait up be fired because they take any chance they can get to slack off, obviously these guys will be even harder to to identify and fire from home. Then there is a sense of community that managers are always trying to build to try to get people to work together.

I am sure we will have many more cycles of this subject going in and out of popularity. But I find that alot of the people who work at places really have no idea how much thought actually does go into decisions. They often have lots of interesting metrics to judge productivity and when they see a trend, right or wrong they try different things to fix it.

If everyone in the world was a self motivated go getter we would have never developed most of the employee practices we have, why would we even need to punch in and out no one would lie about how much time they worked right? lol


Working from home should be seen as a cost saving perk, but most companies that implement it don't actually remove any office space, so outside of electricity for a computer and water for the toilet they aren't saving anything. It reminds me of how electronics were suppose to reduce paper waste but actually we consume more paper than ever before because people can print so much without thinking. Sure some people try to reduce waste but most dont. So execs are going to notice things not working out the way they intended.

A company like yahoo needs that accidental discovery and shop floor innovation, they need employees to sit together and talk during lunch so they can innovate.
 
rudy said:
Well this stuff does happen there are lots of other considerations too. There are concepts like accidental discovery and shop floor innovation that do not happen nearly as often or at all when people work from home. Also many of us know of tons of guys who should just strait up be fired because they take any chance they can get to slack off, obviously these guys will be even harder to to identify and fire from home. Then there is a sense of community that managers are always trying to build to try to get people to work together.

I am sure we will have many more cycles of this subject going in and out of popularity. But I find that alot of the people who work at places really have no idea how much thought actually does go into decisions. They often have lots of interesting metrics to judge productivity and when they see a trend, right or wrong they try different things to fix it.

If everyone in the world was a self motivated go getter we would have never developed most of the employee practices we have, why would we even need to punch in and out no one would lie about how much time they worked right? lol


Working from home should be seen as a cost saving perk, but most companies that implement it don't actually remove any office space, so outside of electricity for a computer and water for the toilet they aren't saving anything. It reminds me of how electronics were suppose to reduce paper waste but actually we consume more paper than ever before because people can print so much without thinking. Sure some people try to reduce waste but most dont. So execs are going to notice things not working out the way they intended.

A company like yahoo needs that accidental discovery and shop floor innovation, they need employees to sit together and talk during lunch so they can innovate.
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If gas hits $5/gallon, I can guarantee you it's going to get popular again, real quick
 
Sadly, I don't think the issue is so much a problem of home or office work but making sure people provide that quality service. Here in America we're all about quantity and not so much about quality anymore. It's all about the numbers. Sadly we are looking at yahoo here. I believe I've gone to yahoo like 5 times over the past year. Lets admit it, Google practically has a monopoly over the search engine industry.

If I were yahoo, I would look over at google right now and try to copy it while staying somewhat creative to keep copyright infringement from happening.
 
Usually a sign of band management. Managers who feel like they can't "manage" people when they aren't on site. I'm not saying work from home works in all cases or for all people, however there's no reason to end it wholesale. The times when that happens, it usually signals a change in the direction of "stupid" on the part of management.
 
Just passed 1 year working from home.

You'd have to pay me about double what I make to get me back into an office environment.

Not to mention, easily more productive. Having to drive 45 minutes to press buttons was stupid
when I could do it remote in 5 minutes. But previous employer wanted to bill those onsite hours
not realizing 2 x remote hours at the same time was better than 1 onsite hour.
 
I work in finance and many of us work from home at least once a week.....Usually, we are more productive, no distractions, no BS, no getting pulled off from various requests....Anyone who would slack off in that environment wouldn't have a job there anyway as people might go weeks without even seeing their boss and they are expected to get done whatever needs to be, which may mean nights, weekends, or 80 hours a week during quarter closes, and they don't always have someone behind them telling them and need to take it upon themselves.

I work late often, but just about never have I been asked to.....It's expected that you will if you need to, and working from home is no different.
 
rudy said:
A company like yahoo needs that accidental discovery and shop floor innovation, they need employees to sit together and talk during lunch so they can innovate.
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The only thing I could think of is that the at home workers were abusing the policy. Either that or the company felt that was the case and needed to pull everyone onsite to set some baselines as to what productivity should be, before letting them go back to working from home with some numbers to compare productivity against. You'd like to think "as long as the work is getting done", but with Yahoo sucking hind tit the way they are, I don't think they can afford to be complacent. Personally, I think the announcement should have had more information in it, so people understood some reasoning behind the move. The other thing I can see is from the above quote, perhaps they just need people to get together and be creative. That's not as easy to foster with tele-workers. Even though I work from home a couple days a week, sitting in a coworkers cube going over a project is much better then IM'ing him, or even talking with him over the phone or email. Sometime, no matter how much you like to think otherwise, in person is the best way to go.

That said, I would hope Yahoo would be able to get things figured out within a few months and at least let people start working from home a couple days a week. Now that I'm able to do this, I would hate to have to go back to having to go into work every day.
 
There is definitely a cultural bias against telecommuting with many companies (including the tech ones) but I suspect this is more about Yahoo aligning against their principle competitor (Google) ... Google has tons of amenities on their campus because they don't want people to leave ... and as others have mentioned, with tech companies there is sometimes a lot of collaboration required where you need to interface with your coworkers

I think as technologies like Telepresence become more advanced that companies will be able to maintain the collaborative atmosphere, even with greatly distributed teams ... however, I think most of the managers aren't technically savvy enough to fully utilize the technologies that make distributed teams (including work at home members) part of a coherent and collaborative structure ... heck, some managers barely understand the concept of teams, let alone distributed virtual teams ;)
 
collegeboy69us said:
No office poiltics
No wasting time BS'ing people you dislike or hate
No wasted time/energy/gas to get ready or fight traffic.
Better morale
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+No dicking around comparing the size of each others paychecks.
 
mrtheshaggy said:
What is with old fucks and not understand the loss of productivity by terrible technology standards within the company?
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Unlike my last company, where I currently work, they see the importance of proper hardware.

It's really a waste to be paying someone to sit around and wait for thier computer, especially with hardware so cheap nowdays.
 
rudy said:
Working from home should be seen as a cost saving perk, but most companies that implement it don't actually remove any office space, so outside of electricity for a computer and water for the toilet they aren't saving anything.
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My company allows occasional work from home, but usually when people have a reason, like having to take care of a sick kid, etc. I remember one day last year when one office had huge snow storm, and only one person was in the office, everyone else working from home, since most of them couldn't get to the office :)
 
I've worked at home for the past 5 years and will not ever return to "the office" on a full time basis, again. I work with people scattered across the globe, so it's inpossible for us to be centralized, anyway.

In my experience, when managers end or severely restrict work from home arrangements, it's invariably a power trip. They want more control over employees and the best way to get it is to have them on site, planted in properly assigned paperboard cubicles.

As for fucking around, I guarantee it goes on as much in the office if not more than at home. Personally, I wouldn't give a damn if employees fucked around if they met their deadlines/objectives consistently. I actually had one manager, many years ago, tell a group of us he didn't care if we watched porn 75% of the time as long as we did our jobs.
 
FighterAce124 said:
In a company like Yahoo, the bulk of WAH people are likely cutomer facing - customer service, billing support, etc. It's not hard to measure if those employees are doing their job or not - As a customer facing person, you generally have metrics to meet, which are not flexible between WAH and in office - all employees doing customer service would be expected to meet the same metrics.

Assuming that the bulk of WAH is customer facing, I would only venture then to assume that they have looked at it and for one reason or another, home workers are not measuring up. Or, maybe they have a higher turnover rate for WAH vs in office, which could be tied to not meeting metrics, which would then raise cost as they have to train a new person...

Just a guess, but seems somewhat plausible.
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Agreed, there had to be an actionable, measurable reason for this change.

Don't get me wrong, WAH is a nice way to introduce flexibility for snow days, but that's the biggest benefit I see to it imo. And while there are surely people taking advantage of it correctly, I'm erring on the side that far too many were abusing it.

Apart from Yahoo's Fantasy sports section, I'd probably never visit it. It's also b/c Yahoo's App is incredibly less bloaty than ESPN's that they also have my vote for apps. But that's sports related only. They have SO much work to do, I don't think anyone should be arguing against this until Yahoo has regained their lost market share :p
 
I'm lucky enough to have the option to work from home 1-2 days per week. I live an hour from work, so for me, that's an extra 2 hours a day I can either spend getting work done, or if it's a busy week, catching up on personal time for my sanity.

I think a balance between the two is great. There's a reason people are all called to be in the office at the same time. If you have a collaborative work environment for instance, there's a lot to be learned from coworkers' or superiors' conversations, and they're more willing to include you if they don't have to go out of their way to call you up... if you're not there, you're easily left out.

Of course this is one of the benefits of working from home. If you're slammed, there's no better way to remove distractions than getting yourself out of that environment. If I have a deadline, I much prefer working from home. No deadline, on the other hand, home is way more distracting than my sterile cube at work - plus I go stir crazy if I don't get out of the house.
 
Everything that happens at a major corporation happens for 1 reason: someone in management needs a line item for their resume to try move on to a new higher-paid management job. It doesn't matter if the decision makes sense or not. And the next person to fill the job will just reverse the decision anyway, so that they have a line item for their resume.

That it ALL that it is about. Don’t try to figure out the logic behind the decision, because there isn't any.
 
I actually think no one should work from home 100% of the time except in special circumstances (there are jobs where 100% from home makes sense) My reason for this is that there is a sense of team you can't build with remote work environments. Don't misunderstand me i firmly beleive everyone should be working from home a few days a week if the job they have is condusive to this. Needless to say this doesnt work for the factory worker. For office workers i think work from home is a great thing and that any company that decides carte blanche to can it all is shortsighted and is gaining nothing but angst and frustration. These sort of things make me think Yahoo is really swirling the bowl
 
I work 10-12 hour days working from home. Drag me into the office and you will get a flat 8 hours.
 
I think the real reason behind this move is so that they can lay people off without actually having to fire them (e.g. do it this way or quit).
 
I work at a shop where a good number of our developers work remotely, and workrate has never been an issue for us. Frankly, figuring out of someone is slacking is easy enough that it definitely doesn't require everyone to be in the office.
 
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