Her moves, including buying new talent, are one way to graft new cells into the old cancerous host. And recently she put a kibosh on the company’s work-from-home policies and expects people to come to office nearest to them. The move has come under a lot of criticism. Many who have never managed folks who work remotely have been quick to criticize Mayer’s decision. Our own Mathew Ingram too isn’t a fan of her decisions.

Now, I am a big, big fan of remote work. Remember, it has been something I have been talking about since 2004 and even started a blog dedicated to this cultural shift. GigaOM itself was a remote worker powered startup. So I totally understand the benefits and shortcomings of remote work.

Still, I can understand why she is making such a move. She is trying to revitalize the company culture and it means bringing back the folks into the Yahoo offices. I don’t know if that will be enough to save the company from its actual fate, but in her attempts for cultural overhaul, it is a gamble worth taking.

Also there is an upside of all this hand wringing — people are talking about Yahoo. When was the last time did you have people even talking about Yahoo other than the constant changes in the executive suite?

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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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Your knee jerk answer may be a variety of communication tools and management practices to deal with distance in time and space and coordination issues, but according to David Livermore, president at the Cultural Intelligence Center, the really secret ingredient to leading cross-cultural teams well is simpler and rarer – good, old fashioned patience.

Writing for UK site Management Issues, Livermore notes that our speedy internet connections and lightning fast technology train us to be impatient. But if you want to successfully lead a culturally diverse team, he says, you’re going to need to relearn to go slow:

“Impatience” + “cross-cultural” don’t work well together. Cross-cultural relationships and projects inevitably take more time, more effort, and more patience…. Just about everything takes longer when working and relating cross-culturally. Communication, trust-building, and just getting things done requires more effort and perseverance. Whether it’s dealing with long queues when traveling, merging different technology systems, or trying to get to the bottom of a conflict, understanding and effectiveness come more slowly when different cultures are involved.

Patience needs to be factored in from the very beginning of any cross-cultural project…. In a world of instant information and feedback, it’s counterintuitive to step back and move more slowly. But slow is the new fast when you’re working across cultures.

Do you agree that when it comes to cross-cultural teams the old saying that haste makes waste applies anew? 

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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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Today we’re all plugged in. The best performance you’ll get is when people work from where and when they want. If you shove somebody in a cube and force some training, telling them to do things they wouldn’t normally do, they won’t be as creative … and giving recommendations is a creative process.

This isn’t your grandparents Airstream. And this isn’t a 20th century form of telecommuting. Needle provides a platform that brings fans, brands and customers together. Needlers, as the fan/experts are known, can be selected by the client company if it has existing connections with its fan experts, or by Needle through the client company’s social networks. The key is that Needlers are passionate fans who love to talk about the brands they cover.

Map of Needlers and realtime chats – shown on screen inside the bus

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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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Potential problems are, obviously, numerous, as a first person narration of a dual remote worker marriage in Marie Claire illustrates. With sections written by both members of a telecommuting couple, the piece enumerates the many challenges of a spouse joining his or her hubby in home working. Chris Norris, the first member of the couple to go remote, describes what it was like to suddenly have his wife, Ellen Carpenter, around the house after she was laid off and started working freelance. He chooses a frankly homicidal reference:

For six months now, my wife and I, both writers, have been working at home together in our one-bedroom apartment. If the precariousness of this situation isn’t obvious, I refer you to the best film ever about shared domestic work space: The Shining. There’s Jack Nicholson’s would-be author, self-exiled in an empty hotel. Typewriter clacking, he squints into the page—limning, seeking, probing, his mind finally edging up against that drifting, vaporous thought, when … “Hi, Hon!” chirps googly-eyed Shelley Duvall. “Get a lot written today?” The ax murders that follow are excessive, I grant you, but incomprehensible? I don’t judge.

True, our two-desk living room is no Overlook Hotel — even if it is a feng-shui horror show — and Ellen respects its sanctity. But I do feel like a crucial curtain has been pulled back. In our courtship phase, when she worked at an office, she would often swing by my place after work and find me lounging on the couch in a rumpled Agnès B. shirt (just put on), an open book on the table (unread), and another finished project on the screen. “Yep,” I’d say. “This is where the magic happens.” Now she knows what the magic actually looks like.

For her part, Carpenter didn’t suffer from a loss of privacy or murderous hallucinations but from the imposition of domestic expectations on her professional time. The couple set ground rules about interrupting each other when she started working from home, she writes, agreeing that,

From 10 to 6, Monday through Friday, we’d be colleagues. But very quickly, I took on other roles as well. Because Chris was used to my only being home in the evenings (making dinner) or on the weekends (making lunch, Swiffering the floor), certain primal, gender-specific assumptions were activated. Coworker? Try personal chef, maid, cheerleader, dog walker, masseuse, and make-out partner — on call, 24/7. In my attempt to adapt to his routine, I unconsciously stepped into some kind of ’50s, June Cleaver stereotype. The first week, I offered to make lunch. The next, I volunteered to read an article he had just finished and to give him feedback prior to its submission — that is, to tell him it’s great. The week after that, I assumed laundry duties.

Slowly but surely, all this wrought a learned helplessness I still can’t quite believe. My husband was once a strong, independent man who’d return from a six-mile run with a bouquet of my beloved dahlias. Now he can’t crack open a can of Progresso.

By the end of the Marie Claire article, you’re really, really rooting for Carpenter to get another office-based job. Are things always so grim for couples that work from home together? A recent two-part interview of another remote working couple on blog How to Work From Home offers more grounds for hope. Again, the wife, coach Maria Varallo, struggles more to separate the domestic and the professional. “There are times I find it too much being mom and wife whilst being a professional all at once,” she says. But in this case, having a partner working at home seems to have affected the husband in the opposite way it did Norris. Rather than reverting to 1950s-era stereotypes, Varallo’s husband Kris, a database administrator, has actually become more aware of all the effort that goes into running a family.

“The great thing about working from home is Kris is far more sensitive to what needs doing. I especially have noticed over the years as my work has grown and become more established how the house becomes very relaxed,” Varallo says. “If I put on the washing in the morning he’ll put it out if I’m out, he is aware and I think that’s because he also works from home.”

So how do you get a situation more like Varallo’s and less like Carpenter’s? Steve Cooper, co-founder of Hitched, an online magazine for married couples, recently offered some tips to Forbes. Citing a recent letter his magazine received from a woman with a problem (e.g. husband) much like Carpenter’s as inspiration, Cooper offers these suggestions:

Define Your Workspace. Having a space of your own is extremely important, even if one of you has to work from the kitchen table. If possible, set up shop in two separate rooms on opposite sides of your home.

Create Office Hours. If you only have one room that can work comfortably as a home office, [owner of The Protocol School of Texas Diane] Gottsman says you might trade use of that room by creating work hours.

Communication. Dialogue with each other is paramount. “You have to be able to talk to each other and really be honest without becoming defensive,” says Gottsman. Have a conversation where you explain what you need, when you need it and how these ground rules need to be followed going forward.

Dealing with the Family. Your boundaries should be very, very clear. “We want to feel like what we’re doing is of value and that our spouse also values us,” says Gottsman. “It may not seem as important, but if we’re doing it, it is important.” Your family needs to know they cannot walk in to your office and interrupt.

Check out the full article for more detailed advice. Author Jenna McCarthy has also offered tips to TheMogulMom, including, “if you have the occasional need to check in with your spouse throughout the day, you can save a ton of time by setting up an IM account.” As well as, “be mysterious…. wives tend to way overshare when it comes to the minutia of their lives. Your dude doesn’t need (or want) to hear a play-by-play of your day.” Though one wonders if husbands are really immune from long-winded explanations of their professional trials and tribulations (personal experiences says no), this last tip makes sense if applied to both genders.

Has working at home with your partner changed the gender dynamics between you, i.e. is one person taking on a more or less traditional role around the house?

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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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