Working Here, There, and Everywhere

When Marissa Mayer took over as CEO at the struggling Internet company Yahoo, it was not surprising that she would implement some of the organizational techniques used at her wildly successful former company, Google. She provided each employee with a new smartphone and free meals. And in a controversial step, she put an end to the company’s work-at-home policy: she wanted employees to be collaborating face to face on projects, which meant bringing everyone back into the office. Telecommuting, she explained, was “not what’s right for Yahoo right now” (Mayer, quoted in Tkaczyk, 2013, para. 4).

Yahoo was not the first, or the last, company to shift gears on telecommuting: Hewlett-Packard—once a trailblazer in telecommuting—began bringing more workers back into the office to facilitate brainstorming and teamwork almost a decade ago (Holland, 2006), and other companies, like Best Buy, Zappos, and Aetna, have followed suit (Rampell & Miller, 2013).

Reactions to the move were mixed. Mayer, a new mother as well as a new CEO, had a nursery built next to her office at Yahoo so she could take her baby to work. It seemed hypocritical, complained some critics, to deny other parents the option to work at home near their own children. Some worried that employees who used to work well at home would be less productive when faced once again with the distractions of a busy office environment.

But others point out that Mayer was hired to bring the kind of energy and innovation that define Google to its failing competitor, and much of that innovation is spurred by the communication environment at the Googleplex—a sprawling campus designed to keep employees happy while they collaborate and interact face to face (Rampell & Miller, 2013). And, of course, many noted that there is no one-size-fits-all solution, and that different workers, and different types of work, require different policies and norms for where and when and how people should work (Fayard, 2013).

Mayer herself acknowledged that there were trade-offs in both situations. “People are more productive when they’re alone,” she explained a few months after the announcement. “But they’re more collaborative and innovative when they’re together” (Mayer, quoted in Tkaczyk, 2013, para. 6).