Last Friday Yahoo’s CEO, Marissa Mayer, released a controversial memo to the employees at Yahoo telling remote workers that they had until June to begin working from a Yahoo office or quit. The memo sent by Yahoo’s head of HR Jackie Reses said that, “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.”
Since the announcement, there have been quite a few people weighing in on the salience of Ms. Mayer’s decision. Some feel that this is the right move as it is the only way to truly enhance communication and build a “winning team”. Others disagree, arguing that this mandate will reduce productivity, destroy morale, and otherwise spell disaster for the already struggling tech company.
Culture Matters – How Yahoo Does Work
Whatever your take on the recent happenings at Yahoo, I think we can all agree that there are some serious underlying values and assumptions at play here regarding how work should be done. This most recent corporate play calls attention to the basic core beliefs about how work ‘should’ be done at Yahoo according to Mayer. Let’s dig a little deeper into those assumptions, which will inevitably shift the culture of the organization at its most foundational level.
The assumption: for people to perform effectively, they must physically co-located at all times. The deeper belief: people can not be trusted to do the right thing and to perform at their best unless someone is standing over their shoulder. The yet deeper belief: management of people who can’t be trusted to work effectively from home is the way to turn around a company.
Treating the Symptom
We must ask ourselves if the root issue is that employees are not productive when working remotely or if managers are not effectively managing their people? At the end of the day, the lack of trust and lack of effective management is not going to be solved by having people work side-by-side in an office. There are many examples of organizations that have learned to effectively leverage technology to run highly successful businesses with remote workforces…and they’re not tech companies like Yahoo. In today’s fast-paced, global economy, for tech companies to devolve back to this type of “in residence” model seems a bit antiquated and, possibly, a panicked attempt to solve for a symptom rather than the problem at hand.