Yahoo Says New Policy Is Meant to Raise Morale | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo Says New Policy Is Meant to Raise Morale

nytimes.com

36 pointscodex_irl54 comments

I am gonna go against the grain here and agree with Marissa. A situation where you have a couple of people that are remote (while everyone else is in the office) creates all kinds of issues.

For instance, at a meeting 20 people have to wait for that one guy to get on the phone. Or now you have to pass the Klingon mic around so that the remote worker would hear properly. And god help you, if the remote folks are in a different time zone - now 90% of the people in the office get inconvenienced because someone is 3 hours ahead of us.

We have this very situation at work and it's very unhealthy and annoying. I've come to conclusion that on large teams it's either everyone is remote or no one is.

Hanselman (http://www.hanselman.com) has a good series on working remotely and making it work - he outlines the problems and how to solve them. At least he is trying - other folks simply do not.

Anecdotally, it's typically the people in the room who are either a) late to the meeting or b) go off on tangents or c) cause the meeting to overrun. There are lots of good and bad things about remote workers... but being a hamper on meetings shouldn't be one of them.

If you have 20 people in the office - and 1 remote worker - your conference times should be at the preferred time of the 20.

Yeah, I agree. In my experience, the biggest problem with remote people on the phone is that they are actually doing other work during the call and being productive, so if you don't make it clear a question is aimed at them, they might miss it.

They should be, but they are not. And don't get me started on the ensuing hell if you are trying to share your desktop via WebEx or Lync.

My favorite exchange at the meeting couple of weeks ago (with a remote sales rep).

Meeting organizer: Just press the Start button and then type... Sales Rep: I don't see any Start button.

This went on for 5 minutes with 20 people in the meeting waiting around. Turned out, sales rep got a new Windows 8 laptop - no Start button.

Ugh. Biz people can be really bad at this, because they think everyone has Powerpoint.

Once when I was remote, I specifically arranged before the meeting with one coworker to set up a kibbutz session (kibbutz is an expect-script that works a lot like screen, and screen may well have worked, too) showing my terminal, and she was hooked up to the projector, so I could visually walk everyone through my code.

Or now you have to pass the Klingon mic around so that the remote worker would hear properly

There are other issues with remote work, but honestly the company should spring for a decent phone. A few hundred bucks is more than enough, and your business surely has other needs for a decent speakerphone.

If you have meetings with 20 people with nontrivial frequency, you've already lost.

She's doing this to get away from "me-first" culture, which is common to all dying firms, and to get people toward a "goal-first" outlook instead.

The problem with this attempt is that it's one rule trying to stand in for many. The first thing you have to do is make sure that no one is rewarded unjustly, and that no achievement goes unrewarded. The next thing is to get rid of the free riders, hangers-on, bad management, sociopaths and other office blight.

The final step, and she'll hate this, is some kind of ownership. Employees are people who do what you tell them to do. Part owners look for something they can do to contribute to collective wealth through the future of the company.

Sounds Communist? Not to my ears, and I'm pretty far from ever supporting dead ideologies. It's just common sense. People need to feel like they're part of a team, and that's how we signal that in our society, through ownership.

>The problem with this attempt is that it's one rule trying to stand in for many.

Where did you read that this policy is the only thing that she has done?

I used to work at a company where there was a flexible work-at-home policy. It was great, except for this one guy named Smith (name changed to protect the lazy sumbitch). He would frequently email the team about how he wasn't feeling well, or how he wanted to concentrate on something important he was working on, or how he woke up so late that the commute wasn't worth it so he'd work at home.

That was fine and all, but then he would send emails about how he wasn't feeling well and was going stay at home, then show up for the after-hours company parties. He once sent an all-company email to invite others to watch videos with him in one of the meeting rooms during a Wednesday afternoon. I responded "Wednesday afternoon? I think I'll be at my day job then." To which he replied "By Wednesday afternoon, I meant after 6pm. Technically, that is afternoon."

My manager tallied up the days that he did this, and I forget the exact number, but they added up to more than 50 work days in 10 months. The policy wasn't specific about how many days you could work from home, so he was allowed to do this. Worse, others started to follow his example.

And yet, he was getting his work done on those days off, so no one fired him. But, his behavior annoyed everyone s.t. we called working at home "Smithing". I still showed up at work and put in my best, but it certainly was demoralizing to have to work with such douchebaggery.

Do you have any reason to think that Smith would have been less of a jerk if he had to come in to the office every day?

Good question. Maybe that's why nobody pushed him to come in.

I see a lot of comments like this about telecommuting, where it's implied that telecommuting was the problem, when it may have just been a coincidence.

That said, maybe telecommuting was the problem here. But in any case, it bears some thinking about. There must be some people whose behavior would be better if they had to come into the office. Conversely, there must be some people who behave better if they get to work remotely. Not sure which category your guy falls into, but like you say, maybe people preferred him at a distance.

Yeah telecommuting probably enabled him to be.. who he was. And yeah, it's entirely possible if he had come in every day (as annoying as that would have been) we would have been able to call him on it more and either have him fall in line or compel him to take his BS elsewhere.

He should have been fired. Work from home culture is not an excuse to screw off. It is an empowerment to do your best work in the location that best inspires that.

Often that isn't work. The problem here sounds managerial to me - that perhaps Yahoo's management can't tell good work from bad work so they fall back on vanity metrics like "butt time in seat."

> he was getting his work done on those days off

> He should have been fired.

If he was getting his work done, what does it matter? This response reeks of 'if I can't see him working, he isn't working.'

"And yet, he was getting his work done on those days off, so no one fired him."

He may very well have been a poor worker, but it strikes me as odd how superficial our idea of a good worker is. Productivity being equal (at home or work), what does it matter if he seems to be having it easy? The illusion of looking busy still carries a lot of weight apparently.

I admit I wasn't aware of the quality of his work or his actual productivity. I had heard from others that he was good but not special, and when he finally left we didn't feel like we lost a critical player.

The things that made us think he wasn't productive were: 1.) when he emailed the company saying he was sick and then show up at the company party later that day (more than once); 2.) his solicitation of others to watch non-work-related videos with him during business hours; 3.) his inability to face up to the fact he was soliciting others to watch non-work-related videos with him during business hours.

It matters if the psychological effect on other employees causes them to become less productive or increases the likelihood that they'll look for another job.

So it's this guys problem that others can't act like adults?

I think it's unreasonable to define 'acting like an adult' in a way that's likely to exclude 99% of humanity.

I have had the opposite problem - I've had people on my team that I wish would work remotely because they are frustrating to be in the same room with.

Reading this story, the only fault of Smith seems to be that he worked at home and didn't need to. That's an odd thing to be so upset about, so I would guess he was annoying in other ways.

The reason why we started to get annoyed with him because the company party was announced after he had emailed in sick, and then he decided to show up. I think the fact that he could work from home laid bare his douchebag self, and yes that was why he was annoying.

I neglected to mention that the company eventually decided to make it a policy to not email the entire company about working from home. This made him much more tolerable. :-)

Four hours of commuting a day just to do something that could have been done on Skype, WebEx, or Google Hangouts always raises my morale...

If morale is low maybe it is because of a poor company structure, bad management, or a stagnant job. None of which get resolved by switching where someone is sitting.

By the way I thought just yesterday they were claiming this was the result of workers being "lazy" (VPN logs etc)?

Four hours of commuting a day just to do something that could have been done on Skype, WebEx, or Google Hangouts always raises my morale...

Then don't live two hours a way from work.

Thanks, sage advice to be sure.

It strikes me as a way to reduce headcount without announcing layoffs.

It's shitty if you were one of the telecommuters; and while I am loathe to side with a crappy doublespeak management move… Yahoo! does need a shake up. That's Mayer's whole deal, right?

On one hand, this strikes me as an example of, "Something must be done, this is Something, therefore this must be done."

On the other hand, if you assume that Yahoo was doomed, then everybody was going to get screwed. If Meyer can save the company while only screwing e.g. half the workforce, that's a substantial improvement, even if not all of the changes necessarily help.

Yahoo is no stranger to layoffs, why go about it in such an obtuse way? Maybe the simplest answer is the most likely one - they want more control over their employees.

Exactly. The people who only work from home is in the low hundreds ~200 is what's being bandied about. That would have near zero impact on headcount. Other issues are at play.

I'm a little sad that Marissa seemingly doesn't seem to get incentives. Your people are probably not coming in likely because the company is not providing a positive environment. To speculate after a number of set of layoffs, getting mediocre raises with no correlation to effort, cutbacks on everything, no upward mobility, etc etc you end up with a bunch of employees that got gouged too many times. (Ive never worked at Yahoo but worked at a couple of companies that are where they are now so this is my own guess). The problem for an employee in this sort of environment is that in a low morale workplace you will end up being basically abused and taken advantage of if you show up with a smile on your face ready to tackle the company's issues.

So what's the dumbest (and easiest) thing for a manager to do when morale sucks... try to force you to be happy and productive which is essentially what Marissa is going to do just like any other clueless CEO. IMHO she should have handled this very differently. If you want people to show up give them a reason to or just fire them - you cant make an already demoralized person happy again by taking away an incentive to stay with you.

I think the Economist delivers the best response to this so far:

IN JONATHAN SWIFT’S 1726 novel, “Gulliver’s Travels”, the Yahoos are a degraded band of humanoids kept tethered in stalls by their equine captors...

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21572767-forcing-worke...

The tethered-horse metaphor (which they do not ease up on) really nails their point: empirical criticisms aside, the policy is degrading.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

I've worked from home near SF & for a European client for almost 4 years now, we are on different sides of the world and can make it work so I fail to see the issue here.

We have about 3 hours overlap in working hours, I have a 5-10 minute talk with my boss each morning so he knows what I'm working on & I know what's happening in HQ. He can view my git logs to make sure I am actually doing what I say I am & we manage projects using Redmine. For meetings they schedule them slightly later in the day, their time & we using a combination of Skype & Google Hangout.

Their are times when it would be useful to meetup in person, e.g. when working on user workflows or product design, but this is rare.

I would need a LOT of extra money from an employer to endure a 1-2 hour commute to / from work these days & sit in a cubicle farm or factory-floor style open plan office.

Wow what a suck up article to Yahoo :

"Parking lots and entire floors of cubicles were nearly empty because some employees were working as little as possible and leaving early."

That's certainly not what I heard from how it worked at yahoo, I guess all those managers just don't care if the devs do not delivers there weekly items.

Not to say that Yahoo structure is not fucked up and that this step was not necessary, but the reasoning given in this article is weak

Plus that very bad sounding situation, even if true, was not addressed at all by this new policy.

From Wiki

Having worked from home during the end of her pregnancy and giving birth to a boy, Marissa Mayer returned to work at Yahoo Headquarters where she has built a nursery next to her office suite. Shortly thereafter, she drew ire for issuing the ban on telecommuting

right - she is trying to lead by example.

you shouldn't work from home - you should be homing from work.

I don't know if any progress gets made in this debate. Its an interesting Rorshak test scenario.

My own opinion is that managing teams might mean that some folks are remote, and it might mean that they aren't, but the goal is the mission of the team and if you're all aligned on that then you working out specific communication or productivity problems is a lot easier, for everyone.

That said, there are people who make it their goal to work as little as possible and not get fired. Some folks are really good at it. Sometimes I've felt that if an individual put as much effort and thought into their engineering as they did on creative ways to game the system they would be a lot more productive. There are also folks who are conflicted about their goals, they are working because it pays a salary and perhaps has benefits, but they are really passionate about something else like a musical career or one guy I knew was trying to be a chef.

Generally though if you've signed up to manage someone, that includes understanding what they are working on and their work habits with respect to the rest of the team. Understand that while your manager might ask you to do your job better you can also ask them to do their job better. It is completely legit to tell your manager that you're bothered by folks slacking off or being twits.

As an indirect shareholder of Yahoo (through MUTFs/ETFs), I find it a little infuriating that the only signal they had were VPN logs to determine that employees were completely not doing their job over a long period. Where is the manager accountability here?

Yahoo has some 14,500 employees. There were 200 employees targeted by the widely reported action.

Was innovation and collaboration really suppressed because 1.3% of the employees worked at home?

This all sounds rather ridiculous.

I don't know anything about the situation Yahoo, but it's quite possible that a small number of people exploiting a perk can make the other people feel resentment.

These were people who had negotiated full time work at home for various reasons (probably as a condition of employment). They aren't really exploiting a perk.

Further I would never lead based upon reducing resentment -- I remember one workplace where a non-contributor became infuriated that technical discussions happened in group email, demanding that HR step in and stop it. They resented that the people who knew the most had the floor the longest, and demanded that the process happen in a roundtable meeting room format where everyone can show that they were a part of it.

Whether it's called "condition of employment" or "a perk" the effect on other employees' morale can be the same. Other employees can, correctly or not, see themselves as busting their ass while Joe gets to slack off.

> Further I would never lead based upon reducing resentment

You give an example where an entire group is working well, and a single person is mad. That is not a good counterpoint against the theory that you should take action if one person is happy and many others are unhappy.

I'll say again (although I shouldn't need to) that I don't know if this was the situation at Yahoo.

Part of the problem here is considering working at home a perk.

I don't know anything about the situation at Yahoo, but in any company of 14,000 people, I find it hard to believe inter-team/department tension is based on objective reality.

e.g. If sales and engineering don't get along, engineering will tend to believe sales is always taking advantage of sleazy junkets and sales will tend to believe engineering is playing games all day, regardless of the reality. [1]

So removing perks from one or both feuding groups can hardly be expected to address any underlying problems, real or imagined.

[1] Those situations are basically the adult version of the infamous Robber's Cave Study. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber%27s_Cave_study#Robbers_c...

This is a good point, and bad management is going to be bad management no matter what.

However, this seems about intra-team morale. Did the biz people really know that Joe the UX guy was working from home?

(Honestly, if I don't see the biz or marketing person at his desk, I assume he's off at a customer site somewhere. Maybe this doesn't work in reverse from biz-to-dev.)

I think that's an oversimplification. 200 people were full time work-at-home, probably out of the area. I imagine many people at Yahoo live in the area and have an office, and just choose to work from home some days. They aren't full time work-at-home, but they are definitely affected by this edict.

I took it from the linked article-

But for the most part, those employees said, those concerns have been eased by managers who assured them that the real targets of Yahoo’s memo were the approximately 200 employees who work from home full time.

Right, that's what Yahoo is saying now. It would be interesting to hear if there were a lot of people working from home a couple of days a week, or if that was forbidden before the new policy. Because if this really only affects 200 people... why does it even matter much to Yahoo matter whether they do it or not?

That's what I thought. I believe the actual number the number to be higher.

Best Buy is not "no longer permitting employees to work remotely" -- it now has to be discussed with your manager [0].

[0]: http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/05/technology/best-buy-work-fro...

When has any leader ever done something they believed would lower morale? The problem is almost always that leadership is so out of touch they don't know how their actions affect morale.

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