In the internal memo published by All Things Digital, Yahoo’s head of human resources said that the company wanted to improve the working environment at the company, and in order to do so, it needed people to work in the same physical location. According to the memo, “speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home,” and therefore working at home was no longer going to be supported — in other words, find a way to work at the office or quit:

“To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings… We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.”

Yahoo says it needs to re-build its culture

Although most of the responses from tech-industry insiders have been resoundingly negative, the Yahoo plan does have its supporters: some say the company has fallen so far behind its competitors after years of inaction and bad strategy that Mayer needs to bring the scattered remnants of its corporate culture together, and one of the best ways to do that is through physical proximity. In other words, the company’s “insights from hallway discussions” argument has some truth to it.

People, I know it sucks for 500 who can't WFH but @marissamayer trying to ensure other 12k Yahoo employees still have an office to come to

—
Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) February 23, 2013

According to some ex-Yahoo staffers, many of those who currently have work-at-home arrangements are disgruntled employees who provide little value, and so forcing them to work in an office is either a) a way of getting them to drop this attitude, or b) an easy way to get them to quit and save the company some money. Either way, the argument goes, Yahoo as a whole winds up benefiting financially. But at what cost to the company’s reputation?

Yahoo has also taken fire from critics who see the move as an attack on employees who can’t afford to work in an office, including single mothers and others who require more flexible work arrangements. This is an argument that the company should theoretically be more open to, they say, because Mayer herself is a new mother — although she also happens to be one with a built-in nursery in her office according to some reports.

Many argue that remote workers are more efficient

The debate over whether employees are more productive in the office or at home has been going on for at least a decade, if not longer, and there is still plenty of disagreement on both sides. In addition to the impromptu hallway conversations and other social benefits of working alongside other people — which are clearly very real, as I and many other remote workers will admit — some managers believe employees who work at home invariably goof off and get less done (although as our GigaOM Pro analyst Stowe Boyd argues, this often says more about those managers than their staff).

The new Yahoo policy for remote workers is incredibly myopic. And unfair.

—
  (@danprimack) February 22, 2013

Companies like Automattic, however — the for-profit arm of the WordPress community (see disclosure below) — say they are more efficient and friendlier as a workplace without any real corporate office to speak of, and distributed teams like those behind Wikipedia and Linux have been able to accomplish incredible things without a traditional office environment. Surveys repeatedly show that companies with more flexible working arrangements are more efficient than those without.

Most technology companies (including GigaOM) support remote working because it provides a lot more freedom for employees, and because giving staff the opportunity to live virtually anywhere and work wherever they wish broadens the available talent pool enormously. And isn’t that what Yahoo theoretically wants to do, or should want to do? Maybe people are already pushing down the doors demanding to be hired at the company, but if so then it’s a well-kept secret.

What message does this send about Yahoo?

I think David Heinemeier-Hansson of 37signals puts his finger on the problem in a recent post about Mayer’s decision, in which he says that Yahoo’s move is “an admission that Yahoo management doesn’t have a clue as to who’s actually productive and who’s not.” He goes on to argue that, for a company that is so desperately in need of talented employees who are willing to go the extra mile to rescue the former web giant, the decree abolishing remote working isn’t going to help, but will rather do the opposite:

“Are you going to be filled with go-getter spirit and leap to the opportunity to make Yahoo more than just “your day-to-day job”? Of course not. Yahoo already isn’t at the top of any “most desirable places to work” list. A decade of neglect and mounting bureaucracy has ensured that. Further limiting the talent pool Yahoo has to draw from… is the last thing the company needs.”

The danger for Yahoo here is that a decision driven by what are theoretically positive motives — to get employees to feel more like a team, to encourage innovation through serendipitous encounters, and to drive low-performing staff away — could wind up sending exactly the wrong message: namely, that it is a bureaucratic and centrally-controlled organization with no interest in being flexible when it comes to the living arrangements of its employees.

Disclosure: Automattic, the maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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The recent poll of 500 U.S. small business owners uncovered that large percentages of these entrepreneurs are relying on remote work to balance their need to get away with keeping their companies running smoothly. On average the respondents plan to work remotely 18 days over the summer. Fifteen percent plan to work remotely 36 days or more, while nearly half of owners plan to work remotely for at least two weeks. One in four stated their companies rely on telecommuting.

“The results demonstrate the extent to which telephone and video conferencing have become ingrained in the work habits of small business owners,” said Glenn Bray, senior director, cloud collaboration applications technology group, Cisco. “It’s clear small business owners need to stay connected to the office, even during the summer vacation season.”

What’s also clear is that small business owners, freed from the bureaucratic hassles of larger organizations, find plenty of benefit in remote working and manage to make leading at a distance work for their teams. All of which suggests that the what’s holding back remote work at big firms is more a matter of culture and inertia than logistics.

Do you agree?

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With its catnip title backed up with a thoughtful exploration of a difficult and emotional issue, the article has generated a predictably frantic round of response and recrimination online. But even for those who weren’t dying for another rehashing of the limitations (or lack of them) society and biology puts on women’s life choices, the piece offers food for thought, particularly for those thinking about the future of work and the role of remote collaboration.

Slaughter bemoans the “culture of ‘time macho’—a relentless competition to work harder, stay later, pull more all-nighters, travel around the world and bill the extra hours that the international date line affords you—remains astonishingly prevalent among professionals today.” And argues that it’s time to decouple face time and achievement in favor of more tech-enabled flexibility not just for women but for all workers. She writes:

A study by the Center for American Progress reports that nationwide, the share of all professionals—women and men—working more than 50 hours a week has increased since the late 1970s. But more time in the office does not always mean more “value added”—and it does not always add up to a more successful organization… Long hours are one thing, and realistically, they are often unavoidable. But do they really need to be spent at the office? To be sure, being in the office some of the time is beneficial. In-person meetings can be far more efficient than phone or e-mail tag; trust and collegiality are much more easily built up around the same physical table; and spontaneous conversations often generate good ideas and lasting relationships. Still, armed with e-mail, instant messaging, phones, and videoconferencing technology, we should be able to move to a culture where the office is a base of operations more than the required locus of work.

Being able to work from home—in the evening after children are put to bed, or during their sick days or snow days, and at least some of the time on weekends—can be the key, for mothers, to carrying your full load versus letting a team down at crucial moments. State-of-the-art videoconferencing facilities can dramatically reduce the need for long business trips. These technologies are making inroads, and allowing easier integration of work and family life. According to the Women’s Business Center, 61 percent of women business owners use technology to “integrate the responsibilities of work and home”; 44 percent use technology to allow employees “to work off-site or to have flexible work schedules.” Yet our work culture still remains more office-centered than it needs to be, especially in light of technological advances.

One way to change that is by changing the “default rules” that govern office work—the baseline expectations about when, where, and how work will be done. As behavioral economists well know, these baselines can make an enormous difference in the way people act. It is one thing, for instance, for an organization to allow phone-ins to a meeting on an ad hoc basis, when parenting and work schedules collide—a system that’s better than nothing, but likely to engender guilt among those calling in, and possibly resentment among those in the room. It is quite another for that organization to declare that its policy will be to schedule in-person meetings, whenever possible, during the hours of the school day—a system that might normalize call-ins for those (rarer) meetings still held in the late afternoon….

Changes in default office rules should not advantage parents over other workers; indeed, done right, they can improve relations among co-workers by raising their awareness of each other’s circumstances and instilling a sense of fairness. Two years ago, the ACLU Foundation of Massachusetts decided to replace its “parental leave” policy with a “family leave” policy that provides for as much as 12 weeks of leave not only for new parents, but also for employees who need to care for a spouse, child, or parent with a serious health condition. According to Director Carol Rose, “We wanted a policy that took into account the fact that even employees who do not have children have family obligations.”

Do you agree with Slaughter’s diagnosis that “time macho” is a problem and her prescription of tech and thoughtful flex-work policies to cure it? 

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A proposition this intuitive seems like it hardly needs proving, but when researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee actually set out to measure the isolation of remote workers recently they found something shocking. Common sense, in this case, appears to be wrong.  For the study published in Communication Monographs, the UWM team compared feelings of closeness to co-workers and the organization, and feelings of stress due to interruptions of those who regularly worked at least three days a week away from the office with those that worked at least three days a week in a shared space.

Distance, it turns out, doesn’t just make the heart grow fonder in romance novels but also in our working lives. Calling the disconnected teleworker a “myth,” UWM’s release outlined the key study results:

Less is more. “The benefits of frequent communication with others were minimal and not significantly related to teleworkers’ or office workers’ sense of closeness with others in workplace interactions,” the researchers found.

Communication can equal stress. “Office workers reported significantly greater levels of stress due to interruptions compared to teleworkers.”

The phone exception. “For teleworkers, stress from interruptions was associated with increased face-to-face communication, email, instant messaging and videoconferencing. For office workers, stress was only related to increased face-to-face and email communication. Results indicate, however, that phone communication generally did not induce the same degree of stress as the other modes.”

What’s the takeaway for remote workers and their managers? Don’t blindly think that more communication is necessarily better. “It is often assumed that teleworkers need a lot of communication and contact with the organization in order to diminish their sense of distance and to develop a sense of belonging, but we found that the more teleworkers communicated with others, the more stressed they felt due to interruptions, and this was negatively associated with their identification with the organization,” said Kathryn Fonner, UWM assistant professor of communication and one of the researchers behind the study.

“Teleworkers should strategically manage their connectivity in order to balance the benefits and drawbacks of communicating with others, while organizations should focus on streamlining communication. This may include limiting mass emails, diminishing the number of weekly meetings, creating information stores and fostering an environment where employees can schedule uninterrupted time to work,” concurred co-author Michael Roloff, professor of communication studies at Northwestern University.

It’s worth noting that these latest results gel with earlier results showing distance can actually make workers like their colleagues more by diminishing the amount of political behavior telecommuters feel they need to deal with. We summarized the findings here on GigaOM with a famous quote: “Hell is other people.” This study offers more evidence that Sartre was on to something.

Do you think remote managers over-communicate with remote team members, inadvertently stressing them out, because of the mistaken belief that frequent contact is necessary for team cohesion? 

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The Conference Board recently crunched numbers from the U.S. Census to find out, producing a report entitled “The Incredible Disappearing Office: Making Telework Work.” The analysis reveals that while traditional teleworking professions still have the highest rates of remote working – 9.3 percent of writers worked remotely in 2010 and 10.8 percent of sales representatives did – these weren’t the professions where telecommuting was making the fastest gains. What job categories were the fastest growers?

• Records clerks:  5.5 percent work remotely in 2008-2010, up 516 percent from 2011-2003
• Insurance underwriters: 4.5 percent work remotely, up 275 percent
• Lawyers: 2 percent telecommute, up 166 percent
• Software developers: 6.1 percent telework, up 127 percent

In 2000, employees of non-profits were most likely to telecommute, the report also notes. Ten years later employees of for-profit businesses were now more likely to be working remotely. This shift in the telework landscape reflects the fact that “steady technical refinement…has made teleworking an increasingly attractive business proposition,” according to the release accompanying the report.

The report also agrees with the conventional wisdom that savvy management and thoughtful use of tech underpin telecommuting success. “Research concurs that the dual lynchpins of effective teleworking are strong management and robust IT,” said co-author Gad Levanon, director of macroeconomic research at The Conference Board.

Are there any specific professions you are surprised don’t telecommute more (or less)?

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Some have pointed the finger at reluctant middle managers, but on EconLog this week economist Bryan Caplan reports that a new paper offers another compelling explanation. The senior paper by Georgetown undergraduate Alexander Clark, which Caplan, describes as “fascinating,” says the problem with the uptake of telecommuting is signaling. Caplan writes:

Workers physically commute for signaling reasons.  Employers can monitor your productivity better when you actually come to the office.  Workers who telecommute put themselves on the slow track to success – if they can even get hired in the first place.  To bolster this thesis, Clark analyzes the American Time Use Survey using the employer learning-statistical discrimination (EL-SD) framework.  He finds that the labor market does indeed take longer to reward telecommuters for their hard-to-observe abilities.

Caplan also offers an excerpt of Clark’s paper, which argues not only that managers fear telecommuters are shirking, making face time a signal of hard work, but also notes that showing up at the office, in essence, reaffirms a worker’s status as belonging to what amounts to the office tribe. Don’t show up and your boss and colleagues could take the move as a rejection. Clark writes:

In a recent Ipsos/Reuters poll, which questioned 11,383 people in 24 countries, about half believed that they would be at a disadvantage in earning promotions because of the lack of face-to-face contact (2012). Previous research suggests part-time telecommuters do not communicate less frequently with managers (Duxbury and Neufeld 1999). Even so, more than simple communication matters. Showing up at an office may signal positive attributes to a boss. If a boss leaves work for the day and notices an employee staying late, it could serve as a visual reminder of work ethic. Working in a shared workplace also gives greater opportunity to demonstrate cooperativeness. The employee recruitment process often emphasizes the importance of labels like “team player,” and many companies strive to create collegial work environments and attractive office cultures. If a boss were to psychoanalyze an employee’s decision to telecommute, the resulting signal likely would not be that the employee wants to use time saved commuting to put in additional work. At worst, telecommuting would be seen as an atomistic rejection of the (sometimes carefully constructed) office environment.

The effect of these signals was clear when Clark combed through the numbers. “After four years of experience, the average male telecommuter will earn about 6.9 percent less than a non-telecommuter,” concludes Clark.

Do you find the idea that signaling is at the heart of telecommuting’s anemic uptake convincing?

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These findings could suggest that remote work is best suited for senior-level folks and the highly educated – the designers, programmers and content producers that many of us generally picture when asked to imagine laptop-toting virtual workers. But outsides of cafes in places like San Francisco, there’s a whole other side of the remote work revolution going on, one that’s focused on lower skilled employees like customer service agents who are seeing their place of work move from call centers to home offices and living rooms.

Take Hertz’s “Journey to Home” program as an example. The rental car company originally housed its customer service agents in an Oklahoma City call center, but over the last few years has been transitioning to have nearly half of its agents working out of their homes. Why?

“From a disaster recovery perspective, if you put all your eggs in one basket, especially when that basket sits in the center of the United States where a lot of natural disasters can happen, you put yourself at risk for major interruptions to the business, so we decided that it would be good to have another center of gravity,” Joe Eckroth, Hertz’s CIO, told GigaOM.

Secondarily, he explains, “as you begin to mature a market where you’re already drawing a lot of the workforce, competition starts to rise. In Oklahoma City, a lot more call centers are coming in. Remote work allowed us to broaden the pool of people we could draw from. It’s allowed us to attract students, part-time workers, full-time people who couldn’t necessarily, because of life circumstances, travel every day to go to work.”

What started as a disaster preparedness and recruitment initiative has had plenty of side benefits, according to Eckroth. “It has exceeded our expectations for sure,” he says. “The actual performance results on the sales side and on the customer service side were in all categories as good as we were getting in a tightly managed call center and in I would say about half the metrics they were a little bit better — places like employee satisfaction. Productivity is as high and in some cases higher,” he says, and that’s not even including the sustainability gains from so many saved car trips (and the bonus to employees from not having to buy so much gas at about four dollars a gallon.)

Hertz’s experience shows that less glamorous remote initiatives can work, but Eckroth stresses that success requires careful thought and planning. “We took some of our best and brightest people and we made it their sole mission to make it work,” he says. “It wasn’t a part-time job. It wasn’t something on the side.” Hertz’s experience shows getting highly motivated, highly communicative managers is key, but so is getting the right employees, and they aren’t necessarily the same people who would thrive in a traditional call center.

“Anybody can try to work from home, but it takes a certain set of disciplines. It takes a different mentality for somebody to stay motivated, to be undistracted and succeed at home. If you just took the average guy in the call center and sent them home, there would probably be a fairly high failure rate,” Eckroth says, noting that in fact some of the Oklahoma City call center’s star employees tried remote work and subsequently requested to return “to the box,” as Eckroth refers to it.

To make sure Hertz hires folks with the right combination of a self-starter mentality and basic tech savvy, the company has set up a detailed profile of the kind of person it’s seeking, putting candidates through thorough testing to make sure they have the skills to succeed. “I don’t think we knew how different the hiring profile might be,” Eckroth admits. “We didn’t modify our initial hiring process enough to accommodate that, and so that’s something we learned pretty quickly over the course of the first year or so. We changed our competency model.”

Besides figuring out exactly what you’re looking for in at-home agents and testing stringently to make sure candidates have these qualities, is there any other recommendations Eckroth has for other firms contemplating taking agents out of the box and sending them home? “Benchmark,” Eckroth suggests, noting that more and more firms are taking a remote approach and have wisdom to share. “Go out and talk to some people who have done it and get their lessons learned.”

Also, ensure no one feels like an afterthought. “This is a part of the organization. Treat it as such. Agents at home are every bit as important as the guys sitting in the box. I do a periodic video for all agents in our customer care, but once in a while I will uniquely do it just for the at-home agents with a specific message to them. Call them out and recognize them for some of the unique things they do. They should always know that they’re a part of a thought-out strategy. Pull in some of the really good people. They can come in for a few days or a week and work on special projects. It makes them feel that much more part of the team and not like they’re just a contractor out there. If that mentality builds, you’ll begin to create a second-class citizenship and that can be a disaster.”

Should more companies consider letting their less highly skilled employees skip the drive in to the office and just stay home?  

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Just this week interest turned to Britain’s civil servants who are being urged to work remotely to avoid adding to the expected congestion on the city’s already packed roads and trains. The announcement, which might seem ho-hum in some tech-savvy circles, raised a few eyebrows in Britain with the  Daily Mail declaring government workers get “a gold medal for skiving!” (the British English equivalent of slacking off) for being allowed to telecommute for seven weeks this summer. The article notes that “business leaders” are complaining about the probable reduction in useful government work that the policy will bring.

“Business groups criticized plan that has led to fears of a massive reduction in government work as the country tries to pull itself out of recession,” says the paper. “They said it sent out the dangerous message that Britain would close down for almost two months,” it continues, quoting Pierre Williams, from the Federation of Small Businesses, as saying: “A lot of private sector workers will feel rather surprised that the public sector have decided to work from home during the Olympic games.”

A spokesperson for the Prime Minister was forced to deny that staff would be “skiving” at home, reassuring the public that no less work would get done. Meanwhile, other stories are offering businesses looking to offer staff options, tips on how to make flexible working successful.

With study after study confirming that remote work actually boosts productivity for most people and most tasks, the most surprising fact about the boom in remote work this summer in London may be the fact that’s it’s controversial at all, revealing to converted virtual work fans the deep well of skepticism that still exists in substantial pockets of the business community.

In four years when the Olympics are held again, will remote work have become so mainstream that a bit of an uptick during the games will be far less remarked upon?

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If you have a huge pad then keeping your spaces for work and for chilling physically separate is a non-issue – just locate them in different parts of your home and simply close the door on your home office when you’re done for the day. But what if you’re an urban dweller or otherwise living in tight quarters for budgetary, environmental or lifestyle reasons? How can you keep your work life from invading spaces that should be used for chilling?

Design site Apartment Therapy tackled this issue recently, citing a clever strategy an Australian design firm used to solve this issue in a Melbourne apartment. Nexus Designs created what the blog dubs, “a top secret slide-open home office,” using a moveable door that’s artfully camouflaged to appear like just another wall when closed (pictured — check out Apartment Therapy for a full slide show of images). The result is a secret space both James Bond and design aficionados would be proud of. The flexible space solves the issue of being “forced to work in the place where you normally relax and kick back to watch zombie flicks,” as well as doubling as a guest bedroom.

Of course, professionally designed secret walls don’t come cheap, so Apartment Therapy notes that the general principals that make this solution successful can be applied to come up with cheaper alternatives. The blog boils it down to three essential considerations:

• Keep it subtle
• Create fine lines between spaces
• Never underestimate the power of lighting

The post suggests curtains might replace fancy sliding doors for those on more modest budgets and goes on to double underline the lighting issue, stressing that you should “be judicious with lighting. Make sure when the walls are down that both rooms can flow into each other, but when separated, they can function independently as well.”

How have you used design to keep work and relaxation separate?

Images courtesy of Earl Carter for Nexus Designs.

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