<p>If people could respond to give me what I need and able to finish their work on time, I am good with that.</p>
<p>oldfort, your technique to make sure people were working is clever, but speaks to the issue of how much more work it is for a supervisor to get productivity out of WAH arrangements. I had one employee once who negotiated a WAH day one day a week. She was productive for some of the time, but she didn’t get anything done after her kids got home in the afternoon. WAH arrangements place a burden on the manager that isn’t there when the employee is in the office–in terms of planning work that can be done at home, monitoring whether the employees are actually there, and showing “results” to justify the practice. So I very much disagree with you, tom1944, when you say “Most work issues normally come back to poor managers.” In my experience it is a big pain to have to work around random schedules and remote offices, especially when projects involving spontaneity and teamwork are the norm.</p>
<p>FYI, the “Queen Bee” syndrome
[The</a> Tyranny of the Queen Bee - WSJ.com](<a href=“http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323884304578328271526080496.html?mod=WSJ_hp_us_mostpop_read]The”>http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323884304578328271526080496.html?mod=WSJ_hp_us_mostpop_read)
</p>
<p>GMTPlus7 - with all due respect, why did you post that article? Are you saying that Marissa is just trying to be the queen bee? Pardon me, if I say, “It is a lot of bull.” She is trying to save Yahoo, whether we agree with her method or not. Again, I am going to say that WAH is not a women issue, it is an issue on how we want to structure work/life going forward. </p>
<p>I personally think people can be very productive WAH if it is structured properly. Many years ago, when WAH was new, Merrill actually implemented training class for work from home before people would be permitted to do it. They had a classroom set up looking like a home - kitchen, TV, living room. They told their staff that it was important for them to always go into the office when there is an office party, meetings. They showed how many times people went to their kitchen for food (something to be aware of). They stressed on the fact there needs to be proper childcare even when they were working from home. The bank I worked at my previous life was also very strict about WAH. They required employees to have a separate room (office) at home because of security information issue. They didn’t allow work from home full time, but only few times a week. They did desk sharing, which saved them a lot of money.</p>
<p>Yeah, not getting what the Queen Bee article has to do with this subject AT ALL.</p>
<p>@oldfort, it’s not the WAH issue that bothers me. I think she is justified in recinding it to turn Yahoo around. It is the prima donna stunt of parading an adjoining nursery to her office in front of her employees that I find appalling. </p>
<p>Is she going to let her employees also bring their babies to the office?</p>
<p>^I missed the part about her personal on-site nursery. I guess if she only uses it outside of normal work hours it wouldn’t bother me. I don’t think that makes her a Queen Bee, though. It’s just like VIP parking, except for a baby. :)</p>
<p>How many ceos fly first class or private planes when average staff fly economy. One may say that is not really fair. But an average staff doesn’t have to hit 2 different continents in 2 days. An average staff doesn’t need to stay up to work on presentation for the regulator and then have to speak in front of the board. If the ceo were to mess up on any of those tasks (due to travel fatigue) then it would have a major impact to the firm. So what would you rather do? Save some money on travel for CEO or spend some money to make sure he/she is fresh when making those major presentations?</p>
<p>In Marissa case, she could have stayed home for 3 months to be with her new baby and also leave at 6 every nigh like all other Yahoo employees. But maybe Yahoo thought it would be more productive to build her a nursery, so she could spend more time at work. I am sure Marissa would have preferred to be at home than to have a nursery at work.</p>
<p>I certainly wasn’t as important as marissa when I had my first baby, but my firm decided it was worth their while to set up an office for me at home. They had a messenger who delivered office mails (back then there was no emails) to me twice a day. I wished they didn’t do that because I would have preferred to have my time with my baby. For some, it may have seem like a real perk.</p>
<p>For a long time, male ceos have had a lot more perks than average staff, and no one has ever complained about it. I think for GMTplus7 to highlight one perk for this female ceo is probably a lot more indicative of the article she posted. For some reason females still can’t be supportive of each other.</p>
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<p>Or would even think to label it as the male version of prima donna behavior. Is there even a word for that?</p>
<p>sally I missed your question to me in post 122. Yes it could be a pain but the best managers need to deal with all types of situations. It is easy to mangage the 1927 Yankees the real great managers get the 1969 Mets to win.</p>
<p>^I am guessing you haven’t dealt with the situation first-hand. Earlier in this thread (sorry, don’t have the #'s handy) I posted several scenarios I have experienced at two different jobs in two very different organizations. It is a royal pain and ONLY benefits the employee, not the organization (in my experience). It is not at all like managing the Yankees–unless the analogy you’d like to make is that the manager this season is going to let the team train at home and seldom practice together before opening day. Or taking it a step further, let’s say the center fielder has a WAH arrangement. So every time a batter hits a fly ball to center, the other players have to scramble to cover his position.</p>
<p>The idea is that it benefits the organization as otherwise the organization wouldn’t have access to a larger pool of applicants.</p>
<p>I have a friend that gave his notice last week. He has worked remotely for the last three years (I helped him set up his home environment to do this) and he’s been working 32 hours a week from home for a full-time salary and benefits (he negotiated this a long time ago). He has 20 years of experience and he is going to be replaced with two other people which expands his group to four time-zones. His project leader and manager will have to deal with two employees instead of one and much different time zones. They are not looking forward to that. They tried to get him to stay but I think that they will only be able to get ten hours a week from him at best. Money has its limitations.</p>
<p>I can see where it would be more work for the manager to keep track of people but ideally the manager would hire people that they are pretty sure of that they would meet their work responsibilities. Of course, sometimes managers inherit employees. I do agree that it’s more work for managers but it can also be more work for the employees that come into the office every day. The people in the office get the work where a warm body is needed.</p>
<p>BC, tom, et al, I think you are both failing to account for the NATURE of the work that Yahoo and other businesses are doing. Tech companies are legendary for their frequent and informal “scrums” and all-hands-on-deck marathon development sessions. Same goes for my industry (advertising). We are collaboratively working on creative campaigns ALL DAY LONG–brainstorming as a team, then going back to our desks to develop ideas, then regrouping to see where we are before refining our concepts. As a manager, I go desk to desk frequently to give feedback and direction. This happens every day, and having even one person out of the office gets in the way of meeting our deadlines. What are we supposed to do, reserve a conference room and set up a WebEx every time we want to go over our work with remote coworkers? Have every designer make PDFs so they can be sent to the one team member who just couldn’t make it in that day, and then wait for her feedback? It just isn’t possible or productive to even consider such an arrangement when we are on the clock for our clients and being held to high standards of productivity. I am sure there are industries in which it makes no difference whether people are physically there or not. But for Yahoo and companies like mine, it’s just untenable both from a managerial standpoint and a work-output standpoint.</p>
<p>I think Yahoo’s issue is that Marissa just wants to know who actually works for Yahoo, lets try to put the name to the face (what have you done in the last 6 months). They have been running a bit too fast and loose for a long time.</p>
<p>The place I am at now does not like WAH. They prefer to have us in the office</p>
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<p>I’ve been working in this environment since the mid-1980s.</p>
<p>We have periods in our schedule where everyone should be in the office spending time in long meetings. But we have employees that are remote - that a choice by the company to reduce labor costs. So we have people that call into meetings. And since we do it for remote facilities, we also do it for local employees that don’t always want to be in the office.</p>
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<p>There are companies that accommodate remote communications well. This has been an adaptation given a lot of outsourcing to India and other low-cost countries. So we do distributed presentations and documents as a matter of normal business. We have our own collaboration software for distributing video too but that’s more for very large gatherings.</p>
<p>I’d expect a company like Yahoo to have adapted to distributed workforces many years ago.</p>
<p>^Maybe if they had, they would be in a better position right now.</p>
<p>In any case, it wouldn’t work for my business…or the Yankees. :)</p>
<p>I have 7 different office locations (I work out of an 8th office) and my staff spends at least 50% of their time away from those offices. You find a way to meet without being together,</p>
<p>I do not disagree that there may be situations where WFH is impossible but it seems to me the computer industry is not one of them. That said the decision to end WFH at Yahoo may have been the correct one until she gets the ship running how she wants it to run.</p>
<p>“What are we supposed to do, reserve a conference room and set up a WebEx every time we want to go over our work with remote coworkers?”</p>
<p>? Setting up a webex takes 5 clicks of a mouse. We do it all the time for people who are home, at a moment’s notice. My main competitor is actually a fully-virtual company: they have no physical office, and they have a bunch of senior people all over the country. I’m in a related field to yours. I see that it would be hard to give art direction via webex, but one could give copy direction I would think. And working on positioning and strategy could be done over webex.</p>
<p>“A woman I read about, a high powered lawyer, admitted that while she never missed her kids’ sporting events (even the after-school ones) she also didn’t ever make breakfast for her boys. The nanny/housekeeper did.”</p>
<p>I am struck by the use of the word “admitted,” as if this woman’s smart use of her household help is something to be ashamed of. I wonder if her husband had to “admit” that he didn’t make the kids’ breakfast either. Or if any working fathers on CC “admit” that they don’t make the kids their breakfast.</p>
<p>I wonder why men don’t have to brag that they never miss sporting events, and why the bar is overall so much higher for mothers.</p>
<p>PG, I know how long it takes to set up a WebEx. But you need a place to have it, and conference rooms are in short supply in my building (no one has offices…it’s all open cubes). Anyway, it’s not fair to my team to have to make such accommodations for one person when we are under incredible deadline pressure most of the time. Our office culture is one of frequent and unscheduled face-to-face interaction. At the risk of sounding like a queen bee, it is a buyers’ market for creative talent where I am and there are plenty of people who would love the opportunity to work in such a fast-paced environment. People who don’t like having to get dressed and show up in person to do their jobs are free to look elsewhere for the flexibility they want.</p>