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.
Was innovation and collaboration really suppressed because 1.3% of the employees worked at home?
This all sounds rather ridiculous.
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.
> 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.
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...
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.)
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.