<p>Ghost town due to off shoring - why haven’t they reduced office space, I wonder?</p>
<p>My opinion, living here in SV, is that Melissa discovered that many WAH employees were not working very much, and this is an attempt to figure out who is worth keeping and the actual value of those employees .
I cant remember the last time I heard someone say they were moving TO Yahoo from one of the other hi tech companies based here. The most talented employees left Yahoo long ago , and she may be using this move in order to "clean house ".</p>
<p>As I mentioned in the previous comment, I am also disappointed the discussion on WAH problems at Yahoo in the mass media and here focused mostly on employees when management bears just as much of a responsibility for the current mess. </p>
<p>From other news reports, it seems there was so little managerial oversight that WAH employees were able to “drop out of sight” to the point Yahoo didn’t even realize some were still employees. From that, it sounds like the managers weren’t the “strong managers” oldfort cited as a requirement to manage employees…especially WAH employees. One wonders what in the blazes those managers were doing before things came to a head?</p>
<p>Mayer’s solution is a clumsy hamfisted one which punishes all WAH employees without examining which ones were slacking/taking advantage and which ones were productive dedicated employees who WAH to maintain a reasonable work/life balance.</p>
<p>The discussion here has been about the practice of working from home in general and I agree with the arguments made about the positives.</p>
<p>One thing that hasn’t been mentioned is that an individual company can develop its own culture or pattern of behavior that is individual to the company. Once this happens it’s hard to change it, (if it needs to be changed). Just as an example, I read the book about the downfall of Enron and one of the (many) problems that Enron had was a sense of entitlement felt by its employees. At the risk of oversimplifying employees would start working there and soon think they were entitled to the same high salaries and benefits that the other employees had, even when the money brought in by the company wasn’t enough to support it.</p>
<p>Maybe Yahoo’s culture has become one that just can’t support the work from home option because too many employees are taking advantage of it.</p>
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<p>And again, why the omission of the responsibilities of management? </p>
<p>Especially considering their very job is to manage employees and workplace culture and they have much more power to shape and implement policies which have a greater impact on the organization. </p>
<p>I find this especially disturbing regarding Enron as that the key reasons for Enron’s collapse was malfeasance at the very highest levels of the senior management/board. There’s a reason why the most senior members were indicted and later, convicted for their substantial responsibility for the entire mess.</p>
<p>I agree, management has to do their job and the more employees take advantage of freedom the more they need to be directly supervised which is easier to do on site than if they are at home. Maybe down the road work from home policies at Yahoo can be reintroduced but for now Marissa Mayer thinks that privilege should be taken away. Is she right or wrong? I don’t know, I just know she has her work cut out for her with turning Yahoo around.</p>
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<p>My impressions from reading several reports about the WAH issues at Yahoo was that they were caused because there was practically little/no managerial oversight of such employees in the first place. Never a good sign whether an employee is WAH or working in the office. </p>
<p>It shocked me because there’s no way any of the firms I worked for with WAH allowances would have its management allow things to get so bad that some of the WAH employees were able to “drop out of sight” to the point the employer/department/managers didn’t realize they were still employees at the company. </p>
<p>Not to mention that if one was the type of employee requiring close supervision like the one you described, I would think their managers and their higher-ups would have screened them out beforehand so they wouldn’t be contenders for WAH.</p>
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<p>I worked in a very technical department where ‘managers’ were expected to produce just as much as their subordinate engineers. The actual management of people was not a valuednway to spend time, even scorned. If that is how ‘managers’ were tasked at Y, then I can see how problems could arise.</p>
<p>I’d expect automated systems to track projects at a company as big as Yahoo and that there would be reports at each level of management as to how groups were doing on their projects and metrics.</p>
<p>apparently she did use metrics;
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.</p>
<p>Read more: [How</a> Marissa Mayer Figured Out Work-At-Home Yahoos Were Slacking Off - Business Insider](<a href=“How Marissa Mayer Figured Out Work-at-Home Yahoos Were Slacking Off”>How Marissa Mayer Figured Out Work-at-Home Yahoos Were Slacking Off)</p>
<p>I also read that Mayer tried another approach first, so she deserves credit for that</p>
<p>Well, that makes sense. I wonder how she will use metrics to determine what the direct supervisors were doing with their time, since they apparently were not supervising WaH workers. I wonder if this is a structural problem or a top to bottom productivity problem?</p>
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<p>Yet IBM took the mid-sized computer market away from DEC with its innovative AS400.</p>
<p>DEC did pretty well with their VAX and Alpha systems against AS400.</p>
<p>The problems at DEC were from commodity processors below.</p>
<p>What a failure of management. If, indeed, there are “bad apples” working at home, the solution isn’t to get rid of the good apples along with the bad. And the solution isn’t to all of a sudden require the bad apples to commute to an office. The solution is to ensure the managers of the work-at-home employees get with the program and discipline or deal with individual cases of people who aren’t productive.</p>
<p>I was thinking as to how dumb the slackers were too. How much effort does it take to leave a computer logged into VPN all day, even if you aren’t doing anything on it.</p>
<p>I work from home at times but I wouldn’t leave my computer plugged into VPN for hours on end. I go on it just to retrieve certain files, and drop it when I’m done.</p>
<p>I used to IM my WAH employees randomly and they had 10 min to reply. If they needed to be away from their computer at any length of time (doctor’s appt, school visit) they had to get permission first. Most people were very productive from home, but it was more work for managers.</p>
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<p>Wouldn’t work as any firm with half-way decent management would also scrutinize to see what projects/stages within a given project were completed by the end of a given workday/workweek. Unless one works to make up that deficit on another day and assumes deadlines won’t be moved up(Hahahahaha!), their slacking will be revealed by the second or third day tops. </p>
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<p>On the evenings or weekends I had to WAH on top of my time in the office in previous positions, my supervisors tended to be much looser about checking in via IM/email…probably once or twice every hour max with a 15-20 minute response window. </p>
<p>However, we did have a checklist of projects/milestones to complete by the end of the evening/weekend period assigned and there’ll be hell to pay if that checklist wasn’t completed at/above satisfactory expectations.</p>
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<p>I’ll leave my computer logged into the office all day and all night sometimes. In some project stages, we edit for a while and then submit our code for testing. The testing can take 45 minutes to a few hours. So one could make changes, submit, come back when the testing is done and repeat this cycle through the night. You wake up every hour or so, check your mobile for email that your tests are done, go to your computer, check the results, fix any problems and try again or write more code.</p>
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<p>Well, today, you can IM on your mobile device. My former manager just bought a new car and he was telling me about all of the mobile connectivity stuff in the car. It has email and other things. I didn’t ask about IM but that may be an option in some cars today.</p>
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<p>I mentioned that a while ago in this thread.</p>
<p>We have project management systems and every manager up the line can see our progress on our projects. We have to do weekly updates but many of us maintain personal work logs. I can lookup what I was doing on a given date and time. In times past, we used engineering notebooks to record what we were doing along with our notes. Now it’s done with software on personal computers. We can’t put this stuff on the cloud of course as a lot is confidential.</p>
<p>Most work issues normally come back to poor managers.</p>