Yahoo Says New Policy Is Meant to Raise Morale
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER and NICOLE PERLROTH
Published: March 5, 2013
SAN FRANCISCO — When Marissa Mayer took over as chief executive at Yahoo last summer, she confronted a Silicon Valley campus that was very different from the one she had left at Google.
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Parking lots and entire floors of cubicles were nearly empty because
some employees were working as little as possible and leaving early.
Then there were the 200 or so people who had work-at-home arrangements.
Although they collected Yahoo paychecks, some did little work for the
company and a few had even begun their own start-ups on the side.
These were among the factors that led Ms. Mayer to announce last week
that she was abolishing Yahoo’s work-from-home policy, saying that to
create a new culture of innovation and collaboration at the company,
employees had to report to work.
The announcement ignited a national debate over workplace flexibility —
and within Yahoo has inspired much water cooler conversation and some
concern.
But former and current Yahoo employees said that Ms. Mayer made the
decision not as a referendum on working remotely, but to address
problems particular to Yahoo. They painted a picture of a company where
employees were aimless and morale was low, and a bloated bureaucracy had
taken Yahoo out of competition with its more nimble rivals.
“In the tech world it was such a bummer to say you worked for Yahoo,”
said a former senior employee who, like many Yahoo insiders, would speak
only anonymously to preserve professional relationships. The employee
added, “I’ve heard she wants to make Yahoo young and cool.”
Restoring Yahoo’s cool — from revitalizing behind-the-times products to
reversing deteriorating morale and culture — is hard to do if people are
not there, Ms. Mayer concluded. That view was reflected in Yahoo’s only
statement on the work-at-home policy change: “This isn’t a broad
industry view on working from home. This is about what is right for
Yahoo, right now.”
Yahoo declined to comment further.
On Monday, another ailing company, Best Buy, announced that it, too,
would no longer permit employees to work remotely, reversing one of the
most permissive flexible workplace policies in the business world.
Inside Yahoo, there has been mixed reaction to the policy change. Some
employees said that they were able to be highly productive by working
remotely, and that it helped them concentrate on work instead of the
chaos inside Yahoo.
Brandon Holley, former editor of Shine, Yahoo’s women’s site, said she
built the site and signed on big-name advertisers while she and most of
her team worked from homes across the country.
“It grew very rapidly,” said Ms. Holley, who is now editor of Lucky,
Condé Nast’s shopping magazine. “A lot of that had to do with the lack
of distraction in a very distracted company.”
The change to the work-at-home policy initially angered some employees
who had such arrangements, and worried others who occasionally stayed
home to care for a sick child or receive a delivery. Reports that Ms.
Mayer built a nursery for her young son next to her office made parents
working at Yahoo even angrier.
This week, the policy continued to be the topic of much discussion at
the company, as people wondered aloud whether they would lose that
flexibility, said employees who spoke anonymously because they were not
authorized to speak to the media.
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.
One manager said he told his employees, “Be here when you can. Use your
best judgment. But if you have to stay home for the cable guy or because
your kid is sick, do it.”
Many of Yahoo’s problems are visible to people outside the company. It
missed the two biggest trends on the Internet — social networking and
mobile. Its home page and e-mail services had become relics used by
people who had never bothered to change their habits. It ceded its crown
as the biggest seller of display ads to Facebook and Google. Its stock
price was plummeting.
Inside the company, though, there were deeper cultural issues invisible
from the outside. For Ms. Mayer’s ambitious plans to turn around the
company to work, employees briefed on her strategy said, she believed
Yahoo needed “all hands on deck.”
Jackie Reses, Yahoo’s director of human resources and the author of the
new policy, is an extreme example of this philosophy. She commutes to
Yahoo’s campus in Sunnyvale, Calif., from her home in New York, where
she lives with her children.
“Morale was terrible because the company was thought to be dying,” said a
former manager at Yahoo, who would speak only anonymously to preserve
business relationships. “When you have those root issues, an employee
work force that is not terribly motivated, it built bad habits over
years.”
Yahoo has withstood many changes over the years, starting with a
turnover of six chief executives in five years, each with his or her own
deputies and missions for the company. This led to confusion among the
work force about the company’s goals and frustration that projects would
be pulled midstream by a new chief executive.
The company had hired many managers to oversee new tech products, but
the extra levels of management slowed product development, former
employees said.
“Where Yahoo competes, with companies like Facebook churning out a new
release every single day, there was a lot of bloat slowing down product
decisions,” the former manager said.
The new policy is the first unpopular big move Ms. Mayer has made. Yahoo
insiders said they did not expect the employee and media outcry that
followed.
Employees said that unlike previous chief executives, who focused
outside Yahoo, she has prioritized fixing the company internally and
motivating employees.
She introduced free food in the cafeterias, swapped employees’
BlackBerrys for iPhones and Android phones and started a Friday
all-employee meeting where executives take questions and speak candidly.
A recent internal employee survey found that 95 percent of employees
were optimistic about the company’s future, a 32 percent bump from the
previous survey, Ms. Mayer said in a call with analysts in January.
Résumés have begun arriving from employees at competitors like Facebook
and Google, which rarely happened in the past, according to one person
briefed on Yahoo hiring.
Since Ms. Mayer made food free, there are now crowds in the cafeterias,
lingering to talk about new ideas, employees say — exactly what she
wants to encourage by requiring people to work in the office.
“I understand why Marissa Mayer would want to call everybody back into
work,” Ms. Holley said. “It’s kind of a necessary step.”
| New York Times | - |
SAN
FRANCISCO - When Marissa Mayer took over as chief executive at Yahoo
last summer, she confronted a Silicon Valley campus that was very
different from the one she had left at Google.
end quote from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/technology/yahoos-in-office-policy-aims-to-bolster-morale.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
I can see how having all employees in the same facility might breed innovation and keep one of the founders of the Internet alive(Yahoo was the first Search engine I ever used when the Internet first went public in the 1990s.) But since then Google has eclipsed Yahoo and yahoo has sort of been fading out in comparison to Google. So, as far as innovation goes the CEO is likely correct. The people working together in one location might save Yahoo. However, working at home is good for families and with people who are working with health issues. So, you sort of have to balance innovation with productive workers on the job. And working from home many people will be much more productive than if they were on the job. Others might be more innovative at their place of work, but generally these people are all upper echelon people who likely were hired for innovative thinking in the first place. So, to me this whole issue is kind of paradoxical the way it has been presented (at least in the news).
But, in the end you have to admit she (the CEO) is right. Because without innovation Yahoo will be gone and all these people will lose their jobs anyhow.
But, in the end you have to admit she (the CEO) is right. Because without innovation Yahoo will be gone and all these people will lose their jobs anyhow.
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