<p>Everyone seem to equate working from home as an issue about parents raising kids. I hate to point out that working from home does not mean taking care of your kids. You are suppose to still work while at home. I tell my staff that they need full time child care even if they are working from home sometimes. It only means that they have a bit more flexibility to go to a school events or could take their kids to doctor’s appts. It doesn’t mean that they could watch a sesame show with kids in the morning, or host a play date.</p>
<p>To have a general work from home policy takes a good strong managers. They need to be organized, concise of what they expect from their employees, otherwise there would be a lot of wasted time and company money. Maybe this is what Yahoo is finding, that too many of their work from home employees are not working in general. </p>
<p>My previous employer was pushing 50% of employees to work from home to cut costs, but it did put a lot of pressure on managers. I had to look for employees who were more mature and would take more initiatives.</p>
<p>I heard one of her objectives with this policy is getting rid of dead weight, without having to go through the process and expense of layoffs. That and Yahoo needing a shot in the arm to revive itself, she may have business reasons to make a move like this, but to me it seems poorly conceived and likely to have results like Netflix’ decision…</p>
<p>I don’t agree with the one size fits all policy, and I find it ironic that she is mandating all employees to work on site, but she is (in a way) recreating a work from home environment for herself by having a nursery next to her office. Kind of flies in the face of being always available at work if you think about it. I’m assuming she has a worker caring for her child in the nursery, but it’s not exactly classic CEO behavior. it doesn’t match up with her expectation of others.And she obviously will be providing some level of nurturing/parenting throughout her workday, otherwise why have the baby there. Of course I respect her wanting her infant close by and wouldn’t it be wonderful to all have that opportunity. What if another parent requested creating a small nursery by his/her own office (at their own expense) would that be permitted? To be fair I do believe Yahoo provides a child care facility for employees, but that’s not exactly the same.</p>
<p>My youngest now 16 (at 3) attended the child care facility at my workplace, (also a high tech company) and I loved being able to have lunch with him, and read to him when he laid down for his nap. I was so surprised that I was the only parent in there who regularly spent time with my little one, and it was during my own lunch break so I was certainly in line with any work expectations. </p>
<p>Her statement about not being a feminist smacks of entitlement, and arrogance, as if she is just a whiz kid who remarkably got where she is with no help whatsoever. and as if her own choices aren’t what feminism was always really about. to me she seems so self centered to not read or recognize the impact on others’ lives to shift midstream, these days the ability to work from home when needed is a huge perk and people love and need it. Impacting morale certainly won’t help creativity or collaboration… I predict this will be a short lived initiative</p>
<p>I wouldn’t really have a problem with this policy in my company as I’m in everyday (I was the only person in my group yesterday because of the weather) but a lot of people depend on it for childcare issues, long commutes or just because they can work more productively at home.</p>
<p>Perhaps Yahoo does have a problem but the implemented fix seems to have caused a firestorm of negative publicity.</p>
<p>On the old days: we had to wear shirts and ties and sometimes suits in the office. I wonder how that would go over with the younger generation.</p>
<p>I appreciate the shift through the years where I now have the opportunity to work from home half time, as my position has evolved where I support much of the country which I can do via phone and laptop wherever I am. I always respond to requests immediately, show up on all conf calls, and come into the office for every scheduled meeting and client etc. Imho, that’s how working from home is meant to work. I often am designing a training at 9 p.m because my creativity may kick in then, and I also can hang out with my son after school to hear about his day. I appreciate the savings in gas, and travel time. I value this as it helps me but I recognize it must meet the business needs for it to continue.</p>
<p>as other posters have commented, managers need to “manage” their WAHs so they are held accountable if they are not demonstrating that they are working. Of course there are jobs that really cannot be done at home, in our company our engineers who test equipment, work in labs cannot expect to do the duties of their job from home. But they get that, and wouldn’t expect that, while they should be afforded the occasional afternoon home for the ol’ cable guy ;)</p>
<p>It sounds as if the WAH option was not working for Yahoo, with people taking advantage of it to do other projects. And with a company that is struggling, it seems reasonable that they might want to try some serious culture changes. If they can get rid of some dead weight that won’t come into work and avoid laying off the people that actually want to work for Yahoo, that sounds like a positive.</p>
<p>Any sort of major change to a company is going to be accompanied with discontent. But WAH sounds like a privilege some have had, not a right, and if the company thinks it’s not working for them, so be it. Maybe they’ll go back to it eventually.</p>
<p>I find it odd that anyone would be talking about the CEO’s child care arrangements as being relevant to this discussion. I don’t have the same work rules as my CEO, I don’t make his millions, he drives a nicer car, and his child care arrangements are irrelevant to my life. I complain about my work rules, but it would be ludicrous to compare my working situation to his.</p>
<p>I totally agree with what she said about feminism. I know exactly what she means. And it doesn’t mean that she isn’t aware of and grateful for what women went through before her.</p>
<p>I think we are past the days of strident feminism, where women had to be “down for the struggle.” When you have that chip on your shoulder, and you are always in somebodies face…it does not make things better for yourself or other women. Demanding equal rights now, and by the way I also demand preferential treatment for hiring and acceptances, and lower physical standards or a less qualified background so I can get there. We just don’t need to do that anymore, and it is far less effective than just having the equal talent and effort, working hard, and not allowing anything from stopping you from achieving your goal. And stepping up to help other women.</p>
<p>I would probably be considered an ultra feminist, but working with 95-99% men for the last 30 years has made it so clear to me that you don’t need to be a shrill, complaining in your face woman to be successful. Men hate that, and women loathe it even more.</p>
<p>As I read somewhere, she’s using a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel. If WAH is a problem at Yahoo, then they should train managers better, analyze what works and what doesn’t for each dept and make the changes that each circumstance merits. Some depts may be better if everyone is in the office. Other depts are working fine with people in remote locations. Some people may be fine with going to the office most of the time, but may need the occasional WAH day because of sickness or a plumber, cable guy, etc. appt. Some people have proven effective when they WAH; others haven’t. And some were hired as remote employees and don’t even live anywhere near an office. This new policy basically changes their whole terms of employment. </p>
<p>They may lose some slackers. I’m willing to bet they will also lose a good portion of their best employees, who have choices and can go elsewhere.</p>
<p>Yahoo looks like an inflexible, over-reactive company. If I were looking for a job in Silicon Valley, I’d avoid them like the plague.</p>
<p>Agree with busdriver completely on feminism. I am in a similar work environment. Maybe not 95% men, but more like 80% for me. I’ve done well, and it’s not by stomping my feet and screaming. There’s a time to every purpose under heaven. The battle for equality now is more nearly fought on the field of hard work and competence.</p>
<p>i noticed that the OP has yet to repost, perhaps just lobbing a grenade to stir something up, otherwise a pretty ignorant statement. My mother works outside the home and has raised three high acheiving well rounded children (if I do say so myself!) She is extremely organized and highly involved (was event the president of the PTO when we were younger while all the stay at home moms just showed up for the fun events!) Don’t judge what you don’t know!</p>
<p>I’m curious, busdriver and cromette, why would you assume or reference being a feminist as being a shrill or stomping one’s feet and screaming? Have you ever seen someone behave this way in the workplace? I certainly have not. more importantly, I would like to see us embrace feminism and not reinforce those tired, old and negative stereotypes of feminism.</p>
<p>not exactly sure what an ultra feminist is? to me, being a feminist is having choices, and making your personal life choices based on who you are and what works best for you and respecting others’ choices as well. </p>
<p>the childcare arrangement she has and her comment that having a baby is not as hard as others have said, creates a potential expectation that maternity leave or flexible work arrangements are unreasonable, unnecessary…this is my concern. this coupled with the requirement to work in house can create a message that if you just put your mind to it you too can return to work in two weeks. which is rather unrealistic for most women, even if you are a CEO with all the accompanying perks</p>
<p>Dob103…ebeeeee is a long time CC poster who doesn’t just post for the sake of posting…or start threads just for the sake of starting threads. Ebeeeee will be back!</p>
<p>“to me, being a feminist is having choices, and making your personal life choices based on who you are and what works best for you and respecting others’ choices as well.”</p>
<p>lindz, I am sure that you don’t realize how conflicting your statements appear, at least to me. On one hand you are saying that women should be able to make their personal life choices. And in the next breath you criticize her child rearing choices.</p>
<p>Somehow it is wrong for her to do the best she can for her child if she can’t enable all of her employees to do the same? She doesn’t have the right to speak her mind freely? I guarantee you that it really doesn’t matter what she says, there are going to be plenty of women who return to work immediately after having a child, because they must. I don’t think women are going to be flooding back to work right away, thinking it is easy, because of her statements.</p>
<p>I guess the definition of “feminism” means different things to different people. It has negative connotations to me, and obviously to Marissa Mayer. I consider “ultra feminist” to be a person who believes there are no boundaries, restrictions or special treatment, and lives by that philosophy. And I like cromette’s statement of, “The battle for equality now is more nearly fought on the field of hard work and competence.”</p>
<p>From some of the reports, it seems like the lack of effective management…or possibly any management of WAH employees is the root of the problem. Underscored by reports that in some cases, employees were able to drop out of site to the point their departments/Yahoo didn’t even realize they were still technically Yahoo employees drawing a paycheck. </p>
<p>However, the way Mayer is going about this is really hamfisted and I agree with commenters who say this policy may have a heavy risk of Yahoo losing the most highly qualified employees to leave along with the slacking deadwood. </p>
<p>It also goes against the industrial culture which is much more casual and freewheeling than a policy which many Yahoo employees may feel is more appropriate to more institutionally conservative and hierarchically conscious industries like banking/finance or biglaw. </p>
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<p>Dress requirements depend on the firm/industrial culture. </p>
<p>For startups and technology companies, shirts, ties, suits, and other forms of corporate wear tended to only required for the few employees/senior management who would actually be meeting clients on the day in question. Everyone else was still allowed to dress casually or at most…“business casual”.</p>
<p>For more formal industries such as financial/business, suits or other formal corporatewear are still required for most/all employees of some firms. Some only require it if there are occasions for meeting clients or senior management/partners. Others require it on a daily basis for all employees with no exceptions.</p>
<p>lindz, I suppose it would have been more accurate to say you were criticizing her talking about her child rearing choices.</p>
<p>But that’s nitpicking. I just take issue with holding women to different standards than men, and criticizing women for things that would never be addressed with men. I guess I don’t have to keep going on about it.</p>
<p>I worked at DEC which was definitely a technology company. My first job there was as a business applications developer and we had to dress better than business casual. No khakis. Dress shirt. Some people wore ties. No sneakers. Some also wore jackets.</p>
<p>My second job was in corporate. The managers wore suits. The rest of us wore ties and sometimes we wore suits. The upper-level managers had customer visits (CEO, VPs) on a regular basis.</p>
<p>Might have been a time/generational difference here. I was speaking from my own experiences from the late '90s onward. Several older colleagues/managers did mention that not too long before, ties and shirts were expected. </p>
<p>Regarding DEC, one former manager said they were closer to IBM in terms of expectations of dress. Then again, I should mention that he and other engineering/CS colleagues tended to use IBM’s extremely rigid formal dress code from their younger days to lampoon its rigid inflexible corporate culture and cite it as a key reason for its decline in the computer/technology business in the 80s-90’s. </p>
<p>He also worked for IBM at one point and recalled being mandated to wear suspender-ed socks which from his description…sounded almost as convoluted as corsets of the late 19th/early 20 centuries.</p>
<p>This is just my personal observation. When a talented woman breaks through the glass ceiling and makes it to the CEO’s office, there seems to be an impulse to prove very quickly that she’s just as much, if not more, of a ****buster as the men who came before her. It’s a phenomenon I’ve seen more than once.</p>
<p>As far as WFH - my industry is so hollowed out by offshore contracting that the office itself is a ghost town. Nobody there cares where anyone works anymore. We all have specific jobs that we have to get done.</p>
To be fair I do believe Yahoo provides a child care facility for employees, but that’s not exactly the same.</p>