A prudent mix of office time and home time works well to boost productivity and performance.
BLOG: Valley View
SAN FRANCISCO: When a visibly pregnant Marissa Mayer took over as the CEO of Yahoo, she became the poster child for women in the tech industry. Effortlessly stilettoing between the responsibilities on her corporate desk and in her inbuilt nursery, she was embodiment of the corporate superwoman.
In the past two weeks, this beleaguered superwoman has incurred the ire of working women everywhere with her contentious memo banning telecommuting. This edict has been trending the net since, with everyone including Richard Branson, Donald Trump, and a slew of angry blogger moms, pitching in their two cents (or more, in the case of the tycoons) on the matter.
The internal company shakeup to whip the company back to shape, as Yahoo! currently reevaluates its strategy (pretty hard to determine with the opaqueness of virtual offices) has turned into a hot button issue. This policy has been described with terms like a Draconian decree, to a brave strategy, thrown in. So why the furor over a work policy that essentially impacts around 500 employees in a particular firm?
The reaction of the man on the street stems from primal fear on how the success of this enforcement could resonate in his work space, upsetting the applecart balancing his work and family. Coupled with the incredulity that a Fortune 500 company best known for its Web portal, search engine, and social media website, issued this crucial sentencing. In this day and age, when cloud computing and the BYOD meeting has become so rampant, it is antiquated to expect workers to endure 2-3 hours of gridlock traffic ( hours otherwise spent productively) to get to their corporate HQs. This decision seems to be a setback to the servant leadership culture that the corporate world is leaning to.
In certain circumstances, the telecommuting ban is entirely redundant. As work increasingly spills over from the traditional 9-5 hours, an employee find himself having animated discussions into his headset as he drives home, picks groceries, and cooks dinner. Moreover, a multinational enterprise ensues that the workforce is scattered globally, and the optimum hour of collaboration before Europe goes home and Asia wakes up, maybe an unearthly local time.
For the working parent trying to break the old adage that you can either be an involved parent or a successful professional but not both, the telecommuting bans hits like a death knell.
Fazeela, mother of a 3-year-old and an infant, framed a resignation letter as a backup, if her work from home option didn’t pan out. Reminiscing on her first year working from home, she says it was both rewarding and frustrating; answering calls while stuffing a pacifier into her son’s mouth. She feels overwhelming gratitude to her manager for giving her the workplace flexibility.
“I didn’t have to worry about commute or wardrobe. When I worked in an office, I was hours oriented, when I work from home, I’m result oriented’, she says..
The other side of the coin is that though remote working does not diminish productivity, it sacrifices a horde of work place benefits like camaraderie, spontaneous interaction and visibility. Growth and innovation results from a collective mindshare. To create breakout technologies and build top-notch teams, people should gather around a table (business or lunch), rather than Google hangout, since a disembodied voice fails to connect. The direction that the company is headed to, gets lost when it’s difficult to get dispersed employees on the same page.
Sajna, commutes to San Francisco two hours per day, and then shuttles her kids to and from volleyball practice, dance classes, and study groups. But she doesn’t like to merge her work hours with her home life. “Communication and collaboration is very important for my current role. If I dial in from home, I won’t be able to collaborate with my business customers, who will help me build relationships and commitments” she says.
“I have lots of teleconferencing with European team members. It is hard to decipher the European accent because of noise around me at home. (Kids, pets, etc.)”
Mayer has since clarified that this decree isn’t a broad industry view on working from home, but what requires to be done at Yahoo! now to tighten the sails on its ship. The bottom line is that telecommuting works for certain job functions, but is detrimental to others. A prudent mix of office time and home time works well to boost productivity and performance.
Creative people, who work endless hours hunched in their ergonomic support chairs, have to refresh themselves with ‘brain breaks’. And it should be their call if they take the break watching cat videos or water cooler talks or folding laundry.
(Zenobia Khaleel has donned a lot of hats; writer, photographer, travel enthusiast, troop leader, amateur actor, event coordinator, community volunteer, but predominantly go by the title Mom.)
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