It’s not just Yahoo, Best Buy (which, like Yahoo, is also struggling) also recently reversed their Telecommuting policy and has asked employees to be in the office.
I like the NY Times Op-Ed piece on this topic, too.
As I’ve mentioned in the past, I have the good fortune to work remotely (when I’m not traveling – as I have a high-travel job) from my home office. I’ve worked for the same company for over a decade and for at least the first 8+ years I commuted downtown daily over an hour each way. When my position changed to a high-travel job part of the requirement was for me to give up my cubicle (because it would sit under-utilized..empty for more work days each month than occupied) space because it cost my company too much to keep that cubicle. Personally, I was thrilled that I got back an extra 2 hours PER DAY of my life..and some of those 2 hours, frankly, gets spent working MORE for my company..as the lines blur and I have a tendency to work non-stop (even weekends and evenings that should be my personal time)... My increased productivity, however, was merely a side effect, not the motivation for my company to decide to have me telecommute. Truthfully, I think those decisions are more likely a cost based real-estate equation.
So why is it changing at Yahoo & Best Buys? My honest guess is that it isn’t entirely about accountability, being together as a team to pull together and/or discuss issues or even whether or not Yahoo and Best Buy remote-workers were truly working their full 40 hours each week…I think it’s a cost equation.
If Best Buy and Yahoo were doing so well that their office space was too full, then remote offices might look more attractive. However, these companies have been laying off..and they have more empty space at HQ. Plenty of space at the cube farm = under-utilized office space…and hey, let’s get some bodies to occupy these empty spaces!
I saw a similar thing when Borders was slowly sinking towards insolvency. There were large portions of their corporate HQ that had the lights turned off and dismantled cube parts laying around. You could physically SEE that the company was losing employees to attrition and contraction and lay offs..because the occupied office space grew smaller and smaller.
At some point..it’s not so much about employee productivity as it is keeping up appearances. It just looks sad when there are vast wings of your company offices that look like sad empty cube farms that they are..