Doing your home work

Yahoo!'s memo on telecommuting divides the business world

The new CEO of struggling Silicon Valley behemoth Yahoo! has caused a furore across the Valley, the United States, and the entire business world by sending out a memo ending all work-from-home arrangements in the company. The new policy was announced last week and requires "all employees with work-from-home arrangements to work in Yahoo offices," starting from June. Yahoo! has struggled for some time to raise its innovation level, having been left behind by newer companies like Facebook and Google, and that's partly why it hired Marissa Mayer, a famous workaholic, from Google as its CEO. Ms Mayer emphasised that, in her opinion, "speed and quality are often sacrificed" when employees work from home. Perhaps there were company-specific reasons; ex-employees of Yahoo! were widely reported in the media as saying the company is known as extra generous when it came to such agreements. Meanwhile, Google is regularly voted as one of the best places in the world to work, and is known to be an aggressive innovator - and it has far fewer such arrangements.

However, as the owner of the Virgin group of companies, Richard Branson, put it, it is also an oddly regressive step. "Remote working is easier and more effective than ever," Mr Branson wrote on his blog, although it is not known if he updated his blog from a hot-air balloon over the Alps or not. Regardless of whether it is regressive, it is an odd stand for a technology company to take. The central assumption of tech companies like Yahoo! has always been that they use the internet to bring people so close together in cyberspace that actual physical closeness is unimportant. Some will inevitably see this as a repudiation of that world view. Of course, it could also be argued that such a belief was always a little limited; one of the reasons that Google is such a good employer is its famously well-appointed offices, with playgrounds and coffee shops and movie shows and other methods designed to keep employees in the office and not at home. Indeed, there's something of a generational divide in the tech world between younger companies like Google that follow the kind of all-in-it-together approach common to start-ups and older companies like Hewlett Packard which developed productive work-at-home systems that helped change corporate America's view on telecommuting. Apple, as usual, is something of an outlier, with employees patterning themselves on Steve Jobs, who reputedly used to check whose cars were still in the parking lot when he left the office late at night.

But the effects of this discussion will have spilled out far beyond the IT industry, including to emerging markets such as India. One of the differences between the Indian and the American work environment that is often remarked on by human-resources consultants is that, in India, you are frequently expected to be on call throughout the day and even on holidays. That impacts the decision to allow working from home in unpredictable ways. On the one hand, the always-on assumption and frequent communication with higher-ups mean that monitoring of effectiveness is left less to trust. On the other hand, it encourages a somewhat more feudal approach to employees in which "face time" is seen as less a matter of efficiency and more a matter of respect. Either way, given the furore that Yahoo!'s move has set up, it is clear that there is a massive divide in the corporate world, and within companies, about the effectiveness of work-from-home solutions. It is difficult to see, however, how an increasingly technologically sophisticated world will be one in which there will be less telecommuting, not more.