 "New policy meant to raise morale: Yahoo")
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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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, 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.”
2013 The New York Times News Service