I can bring home the bacon…

If she was building a nursery on-site for all employees, I’d say she’s closer to being a visionary. That would still allow people to spend time during the day with their kids.

Not a problem for the working moms that make 17 gozillian dollars a year.

Lets see……how many are there at YooHoo?

Sorry, Kira, I don’t believe those studies for a minute. Most of the people I know who work from home are more innovative and productive than in house employees, who are often meeting weary. The issue, in this case, is the duplicity in Mayer’s message. It’s not the studies.

The problem is that she separated herself from other parents by being able to build a nursery for her child because of her position. Had she said “I will deal with the issues of work life balance like every other Yahoo employee, but let’s all sit around the desk together and get Yahoo back on track,” it would have been one thing T. Pascal. But that’s not what she did. It is a duplicitous and self-serving solution to both of her problems: how to be a working mother and how to get Yahoo back on track.

Daniela Huguet Taylor — there were some studies suggesting that novel scientific and technological ideas are more likely to bloom in an environment when people working on different topics, in different departments, have constant “random” opportunities to meet and talk, and exchange ideas, in a casual, informal environment (smoking breaks were particularly instrumental for this). But somehow I don’t think that that’s exactly what the Yahoo environment facilitates.

Lena Levin I doubt it also. 

John Skeats totally agree that this is a man’s and a woman’s issue. Totally. Which is the reason that I am “on a tear” this week Brian Titus. How is it possible not to notice that in the race to remain viable people’s lives, creativity, finances and innovation are being erased. If the solution for Marissa Meyer is to build a nursery for her child close at hand, what, exactly, is she going to say to a mother or father who suddenly has to leave the office to go across town to see their child in some emergency situation? No! You can’t go. This is lunacy.

So Marissa Mayer, because of her position and wealth, has one convenient solution, while the other mums who work for Yahoo have to find their own childcare or lose their jobs? Charming. She’ll be wanting to ban breast-feeding next because it takes up too much time.

Years ago, I worked for a large financial telecoms company with a visionary CEO who noticed that many of the talented women employees were leaving after their kids were born because they had no workable childcare solutions. He fought the Board tooth and nail until he got their agreement to build a creche on company land, and he also extended maternity leave (to 2 years max) for women who wanted it, with their jobs guaranteed upon their return. Not only did the company not fall apart or go bankrupt as his naysayers feared, productivity skyrocketed! Show me a mum – or dad – who can complete a presentation on time while their toddler’s trying to climb in the washing machine with the cat and their 2nd grader’s home with gastroenteritis – there’s innovative and productive for you : )

Another viewpoint:

Ex-Yahoos Confess: Marissa Mayer Is Right To Ban Working From Home

http://www.businessinsider.com/ex-yahoos-confess-marissa-mayer-is-right-to-ban-working-from-home-2013-2

The issue is a double-standard Brian Titus. If she says all hands on deck, and some of the people who are affected are working mothers and fathers who either do not have the money or physical space to build a full-staffed nursery next to their offices, then it is bad leadership for her to get herself out of the mess by buying her way out of it. When Michael Bloomberg first took office he sat down in the gladiator pit with everyone else.

The issue is that she refuses to address the issue as a real issue and, per the post I made about Sheryl Sandberg tries to skirt it by saying “I’ll just build my own spaceship because I can afford it.” This is the worst of the anti-feminist movement – wealthy women who vote against abortion because they know that if there is ever an unwanted pregnancy in their households they can fly to a country where it’s legal should it become illegal here in the States. This was also Nancy Reagan, running around telling girls to say No to sex when she was pregnant before marrying Ronnie.

You can’t have Kate and Edith (your cake and eat it, too). 

I agree with Giselle — her taking this job was about cashing out, nothing more. If she can save the company and do something for women in the workplace, I’m sure she’d see those as feathers in her cap. But I don’t think she really cares about either.

Giselle Minoli I disagree with her decision on working from home, but totally agree with her decision to have her child nearby. 

I still have no reading on how awesome Mayer is or is not — she seems to have been highly regarded at Google at some point in her career, and disagree with those who say she’s brave to take on Yahoo. It’s a totally safe career move because if she succeeds, she’s the ultimate corporate hero and if she fails, it’s because Yahoo couldn’t be saved.

I’d much rather be Mayer, taking over a company several people failed to turn around, than Tim Cook, taking over the most successful and valuable company ever. If Cook succeeds, he’s just standing on the shoulders of Steve Jobs. If he fails, he’ll be responsible for killing a sure thing. 

Exactly Christy Sandhoff. The suggestion is that parenting is “the mother” and the only mother at Yahoo that will have her child close to her is Mayer. The blow to childcare and parenting issues is staggering.

Meg L This decision of Mayer’s is fraught with conflicted standards – the one about what wealthy women can vs. what those with less discretionary income can pull off, the thinly veiled suggestion that people without income, power and position in a company have to some out “tough out” work/life balances issuesur. But probably more disturbing to me than any of the double standard issues is Mayer’s unconscious compliance with the ages old fear of women – don’t let your biology interfere with your work or you might lose your job; don’t let your biology show at all, because women have to fit into the way it has been done by men in corporate life for years. While there absolutely has been a struggle for me to be more available to their families, they have never had to grapple with the pregancy, pre-birth, maternity leave and breast feeding conundrums that women have had to deal with. It is truly unfortunate that we have not moved forward a cubic inch with regard to this issue. A woman’s biology is a curse at work, even for Mayer, who as you point out, had to race back to the office in order to stay on top of the game. Is that a woman’s shelf life now? Two weeks? That’s it? I think a carton of milk lasts longer than that before the Sell By Date expires.

I don’t believe that she didn’t have to Lena Levin. Yahoo is neck deep in problems. Whenever there is a new CEO in any company there are usually sweeping changes. The pressure to make that salary worthwhile is huge and there really is a stunningly short shelf life for CEOs these days. There are many, many visionary things that she could have done and this is not one of them. If Mayer had been a man the pressure would have been massive. He would be sleeping at the office no doubt. The sense of “having to” comes from the pressure cooker of turning around the company and it gets very difficult to separate it all out. Of course this is my conjecture about what’s going on. But it is in absolute stark contrast to Sandberg’s message surrounding her book. This is a tough economy to be making working more difficult for working Moms. I suspect the age range is going to drop radically at Yahoo. Of course I’m guessing.

I think of course she had to take the job, not financially, but because when a woman gets offered a job like that she doesn’t say No. It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity. And then everything else gets squeezed into that decision. I don’t blame her for taking the job. I find fault with the fact that she has set up a double standard about workers relationships to their home lives, which she was able to do because of position, power and money. 

I would counter argue Lena Levin that painting a scenario that suggests other women can do this is unrealistic and that’s where the problem lies. It is unrealistic to suggest that women can build nurseries nearby for their young children. Most of the women who work with most of the companies do not work at the top of those companies. I can’t imagine anyone begruding Mayer her salary, her title, her perks. The history in America of allowing employees to work at home that have a track record in the company has been long in coming. And it makes sense. I don’t think the issue is about fairness. It’s about a unique opportunity to change something in this one company. I can’t begin to count the number of young women I know who are considering not having children at all because it is becoming clearer and clearer to them, particularly in this economy, that it is becoming more and more difficult and more and more expensive to try to have a career and work. I think the choices for women are brutal.

I predict that this move will spur other companies who have not figured out how to manage workers who are not on deck or do not have a metric for seeing if work is done and suspect that none is getting done to do away with work from home.  

Working from home is just not for every type of job. In one career, I absolutely must be on site to get paid. In another, my value is related to a great extent on personal interaction and serendipitous fact gathering.  When I work from home it is generally on a writing project that is more adversarial than collaborative. So, I’m not a great fan of work from home on anything more than an incidental basis for professions that require interaction. 

(I also have other concerns not raised here like workers compensation liability if you trip over your cat while working at home. Or discovery issues related to your home if you are a witness in company related litigation. Or half a dozen other things that are complicated by not being on deck)

One point from the discussion that I’m not clear on is the nursery. i assumed from the article that it would be for the office and not just for Ms. Mayer’s child. But the conversation here seems to point to a private nursery. Is it definitely private?

By the way, my husband’s company (also in Silicon Valley) used to have a nursery/daycare facility on the premises, for all employees. They were forced to close it when there remained one (sic!) employee who wanted to use it. 

Bill Abrams I’ve lifted this out of the article itself: Alas, with her blink-and-you’ll-miss-it maternity leave and her new policy banning working from home, it feels like Mayer is throwing darts at working parents everywhere. Her stand is even more egregious considering she’s apparently built herself a set-up most moms can only dream of: a nursery — paid for out of her own pocket — adjacent to her company office. “I wonder what would happen if my wife brought our kids and nanny to work and set ‘em up in the cube next door?” wondered a husband on AllThingsD. His wife, a Yahoo employee, will soon have to stop working from home.”

I think the issues are tremendously complicated. Very few American companies have a woman who is CEO. And we have never been able to figure out how to help women with young children, but who are devoted to their companies and talented, be able to work and raise children. There has never been a country wide movement to take that issue on. Women have just struggled through and they continue to drop out when the going gets to be too difficult. Women who are financially better off have more choices.

About the working from home thing my impression is not that all employees are working from home five days a week 52 weeks out of the year. Are they missing meetings they should be attending? Companies do have a tendency not to be able to determine what is the right thing to do on an individual basis, so they apply decisions across the board – not a very innovative way to work.

As for the nursery you mentioned Lena Levin I’m not surprised. What if it wasn’t a good one? Most mothers and fathers I know are pretty pick about the people with whom they leave their children.

This is being talked about everywhere. It’s clearly no small thing – either of the issues…

Giselle Minoli how embarrassing! The answer is right there in the article! 

I think that some employees actually get more work done at home than in the office. Especially, when the commute is more than a few hours each way. Others not so much.

If managing these varied schedules requires innovative management, we may have to rethink how we select managers. And perhaps get away from the notion that just because one is good at a particular task, does not mean that one would be good at managing people.

I wonder if a potential consequence of working at home regularly is to have your company treat you more and more as an outside contractor and then move to contracting for your work on a project or piecemeal basis rather than a salaried or hourly basis. Depending on how little oversight and control there is of how you get the job done, the relationship could easily devolve into a contractual one.

ping Stephanie Van Pelt 

Will people not acknowledge the obvious here?

She is trying to turnaround a company.  One of the first things she needs to do is replace a failing corporate culture with a corporate culture that fits the new direction.

That is exceedingly hard to do if everyone is in different offices, it is damn near impossible if they are all on thousands of tiny little islands working from home.

Is it an inconvenience?  Yes but it has to be done in order to redirect everyone and recast a new organization.

I don’t think this is just an issue of whether people working from home can be productive – this is a difficult choice that had to be made in order to get the change she feels they need.

I don’t think that whether she is a woman or not should even be relevant here.  She is a leader of the company and she is doing what she thinks needs to be done to lead it.

The real issue to me Michael Kelly, is what does it mean to be a “successful” company in our society? This story shines a big light on the fact that we are defining “success” and “productivity” as concepts that burden and even exclude people going through the natural stages of human life — namely child-bearing & rearing.

Of course it’s obvious what must be done — but only if what Mayer wants is to create yet another “Wall Street” success that does not value its employees in truly meaningful (and innovative) ways.

It’s a lot to place on one person, and maybe it’s no so “fair” of us to excoriate Ms. Mayer. But then again, when you have all the money you’ll ever need and none of it is at risk, and you have the power and visibility to make real change, why not take the opportunity instead of merely doing the obvious?

The question I would ask is “what else is going on unnoticed that is being buried by all the talk about WFH?”

So, I’ve been a new mom that went back to work within a week of having a c-section and brought my baby with me. I can promise you in was NOT firing on all thrusters. Working with a newborn is extremely hard, but it was a small business. In fact, it was my parent’s business and someone had to run payroll.

It was horrible. I hated not being able to recover. I wasn’t even cleared to drive! I was the only woman in the business and a fellow employee whose wife had recently delivered took off more time than me.

I agree, she’s setting parental rights back drastically. Just because it might be a good move for the business doesn’t mean it’s ethically the right choice. She’s definitely sending the message that personal lives don’t matter…. Except of course hers. I would never accept employment at Yahoo. They changed agreed upon working conditions and also showed that I, as a person, don’t matter.

I’ve since left my parents business. I work for a software company that has given me work from home privileges when my son had surgery. I never felt so valued. Instead of having to take weeks off and find someone to fill my responsibilities we both won. My job got done and my son had his mother. I work for a company that understands I’m a person, and when my needs are met, I’m more productive for them.

Not to detract from your WFH point, G but why is it that because Ms. mayer only takes 2 weeks maternity leave, that it has now become enshrined in law. I’m sure that the paternity/maternity leave provisons were not changed.

How many weeks maternity/paternity leave do other CEOs take usually?

Most of them don’t even go on vacation!

Giselle Minoli I’m not sure you realize how big of a compliment that is to me! 🙂

This has been a really great series of posts. For as long as we’ve been alive, our culture and society have been telling us what it means to be successful, happy, wealthy, healthy, etc. So it’s very tempting to frame discussions like this in those terms. It’s much harder to throw those definitions out and look for new ones, which is what I think we’re all trying to do here. Thanks for being a catalyst Giselle!

Stephanie Van Pelt I want to be sure I understand your meaning correctly when you write “And that is the flaw in everyone’s thinking…” do you mean that even if your parents had had a son to whom to turn over the reigns of one of their three businesses then your Mom wouldn’t have been upset about your wanting to have a second child, but because they didn’t and you were the projected name on the door her perception was that you wouldn’t be able to run their company?

I’m glad that you were able to leave your parents’ companies such that you could find the balance that you needed for your own life and that you were able to preserve your relationships with them. So important.

In all fairness to the men, I know many, many men who have rejected taking over the reigns of their fathers’ companies because they wanted a different life for themselves and it isn’t so easy to soothe the wounds of that decision.

This all points to how difficult it is for people to solve the issues of work/life balance, whether it is working for a company as huge as Yahoo where there is no family tie, or whether it is in fact working for one’s own family and wanting a different kind of life.

I vote for not being on automatic pilot. It is challenging, but I vote for insisting on a private life as you have done.

Also, Mom was upset about the second solely because they wanted me to run one of the businesses. I do have a younger sister but she wasn’t working with them at the time and wasn’t in a position to take over. She’s a whole different conversation.

The work at home issue has an elitist element to it.  There are whole swaths of the economy for whom this is not possible. I dropped my daughter off at school. The teachers there don’t really have an option of not showing up for class.  I drop off the dry cleaning. The pressers there do not have the option of remotely controlling their pressing machines. I pick up the groceries, The cashier and stockers and bakers and deliverers and all the rest up and down the food chain can not work from home.  I take my car into get it serviced. The mechanics, the parts people, the manufacturers they have to be on deck. I visit my doctor for a check up. The nurses, the assistants and the doctor have to be at the office. It is only the billing and possibly the phone receptionist that could work from home.Tonight, I’ll shoot a basketball game. The arena staff, the vendors, security, the TV crew are all on deck. It is just not possible to do that work from home.  

I like the fact that I will also answer email and draft a letter today from home. I have that option. But many don’t. So, I try to remember that I may appear as a privileged whiner If I complain about always having to make the commute and be on deck.

Bill Abrams I completely agree. I fell over the summer, broke my foot and sprained both ankles. It really struck me how very lucky I was that I could work remotely and that I didn’t need to physically be at the office. Had I been a server at a restaurant I’d have been in very deep trouble. There is a growing class divide, centered very much on tech – I am planning on touching on this topic for my next blog post – why my children are going to learn how to code.

And while you don’t want to sound like an entitled whiner at having to come into the office, this is an industry standard. 

Also, as I understand it, many of these employees at Yahoo don’t actually live in a city with a Yahoo office. They accepted employment as a “remote employee” and physically showing up at an office is more than a simple commute.

Furthermore, we still need to advocate for working and parental rights – at all levels. You can’t dismiss the very real problem this creates for them (and for the view in general) simply because it isn’t applicable to all sectors of the workforce.

I could barely get through Keli Goff’s article Brian Titus. People have been “picking on” male CEOs for decades, analyzing, deconstructing and reporting on every aspect of their thinking – their decisions, their marriages, their affairs, whether they are a good husband, bad husband, good golfer, good manager, how long their lunches are, and how high their lifestyle. I give our POTUS slack…at least he wasn’t back at the ranch half the time like his predecessor. Is this really “picking on” Mayer or is it raising legitimate questions? I’m sure she can take the heat. The rest of seem to have to, whether we are corporate CEOS or not. I am not let off the hook in my life, personal or professional for one single thing. The expectations of me are huge. 😉

Morning, Lance Hagood your comment points out the duplicity in the political environment championing family values and the importance of marriage, family, home, and children, while ignoring how difficult that is to achieve these days. It also points out the conundrum that virtually every woman I know is in: I am educated and working. If I have children will I be able to continue to do both? Is my husband’s job going to last? Is mine? Can we afford to buy a house? Will we both be working in the same City? How long will our individual commutes be? Will the schools be good?

The numbers of women I have seen leave their careers over the last 30+ years I have been working professional in New York are too many to count. And the reasons are always the same: the stress on the mother is almost insurmountable, because most mothers spend more time with the children then men.

No, they are not hobbies or things or tangible personal property. They are human beings and attention must be paid.

I cannot help but wonder if the reason so many American companies are in trouble is because there really is no life wisdom brought to bear on business decisions. I, for one, don’t think these issues can be separated out. One is only as good a businessperson as they are an observer and participator in life.

Giselle Minoli Jealousy? Not everyone can resort to hard work to get past the circumstances of their birth and milieu. So it may be jealousy with grounds.

Stephanie Van Pelt I’m happy to work from home and I could work from home more than the incidental amount I do, but choose to make the commute because I feel like I am more effective in person and I already work so much out of the home that I don’t like to bring to much work into the home. As you and dawn ahukanna note, It is technology that makes it possible for me to work at home. My point is that while working from home might be an industry standard, the “industry” it applies to is limited to those that can translate communication into tech or who do not need face time at all.

I completely agree that if you signed up as a remote employee, then a unilateral change in that status is problematic and probably should be accompanied by a renegotiation of compensation to make up for the costs of being present. 

I’m a parent and appreciate the problems with being one. My youngest was born while I was in law school and my wife was working. Being able to “work” as a student from home was easier for me then than it is now and helped greatly with caring for the little one. 

I’ve noticed though that working from home introduces a stress that I am not working enough or “homing” enough. A twenty-minute errand at home that would be impossible for me at work sets up a stress inducing decision: Do I stress because I’m not working if I run the errand or do I stress because I’m not getting home things done while I’m at home?

One answer is just to spread out work time so that when I work from home, I’m working til late at night. But that has it’s own consequences. So separating the two spheres makes for less stress. When I’m home, it is home first. 

My particular situation is compounded by the fact that i work so much out of the home that I’m hesitant too bring too much work into the home. I use vacation days, holidays, and weekends to maintain a second business. Using dinner time and field trip time too would be even more unfair to my family.

see: http://healthland.time.com/2012/07/06/about-that-atlantic-article-why-working-from-home-isnt-the-answer-for-working-moms/

and the excellent article it responds to: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-cant-have-it-all/309020/2/?single_page=true

I would add dawn ahukanna that just because a company is failing doesn’t mean it should throw its entire value system in the trash.

Bill Abrams I’m trying to think of a case where jealousy with grounds ever led to anything constructive. I have given up many, many things during the course of my professional life to get to a place  where I had the opportunity to work at home. I passed up promotional opportunities because I don’t want to spend my time in meetings under flourescent lighting. I had the talent for it but didn’t want to go that direction. I also turned down more lucrative job offers because being a creative person is central to who I am as a person. I was and always have been fully aware of the risks and consequences of those decisions, which is the reason I’ve always thought, Well, I’ll roll up my sleeves and become a waitress if I have to if it doesn’t work out. But there was no luck, I figured out who I was and went the direction I felt I was meant to best go, bumps in the road and all. If someone does choose the road I didn’t choose, and they leveled their “jealousy with grounds” at me, I would say they probably didn’t consciously choose their own path.

I can say, as some one who worked half in the office and half at home for years that without question my productivity and creativity and innovation soared at home because I was undistracted by nonsense. I think very few work environments foster innovation. With the exception of the theatre and recording studios and painting and designs studios. There is a reason they are called the creative arts.

Bill Abrams do you think it’s possible that even Marissa Mayer is such a person? We often think that people who “make it to the top” are psychologically, spiritually and emotionally whole, and that they are operating from a place of full consciousness about their behavior, their choices, their decisions and their leadership. However, were that to be true, there wouldn’t be so many failed companies – Wall Street, the mortgage crisis, bank after failed bank, the list goes on. Many, many people are simply on automatic pilot and enter the track very young with many things to prove, either to themselves or to others, so that when they get to the top of the heap they have no idea who they are and they never asked themselves what kind of legacy they want to leave. I think succeeding at something “on the outside” is not so hard. I think being someone who leaves a constructive and powerful imprint that is life and business changing is very hard.

Kristin Milton I would love to hear your perspective on this issue and discussion.

Thank you for your comments Michael Kelly. I especially agree with your final paragraph.

I also want to mention one thing: we’ve been discussing this issue through several threads that Giselle Minoli has started this week. In one of them I expressed my discomfort at taking Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer to task ‘as women.’ As a man looking in on some of these problems, it doesn’t always feel quite right.

However, I feel that I can trust my “sisters” here on G+, and at home in the ‘real world,’ when they say they find it deeply upsetting as women. So, I try not to pile on, but rather look for insight and understanding through the discussions here.

Kristin Milton You raise a point I hadn’t heard before. I wonder how much much of an effect whether you are a member of a union or whether you are in a right-to-work state with weak unions has on one’s reaction to the edict.

Yes, is the short answer. Check out mama mia or the ABC ‘the drum’ websites, for perspectives.

Greetings Kristin Milton. Unions. Unions. Unions. Calling Clifford O’detts!

Why Five Days in the Office is Too Many, written by Prerna Gupta, in defense of working from home, argues both sides of the argument, but ends in support of unstructured brain time “to think:” “But it is also the case that some of the most creative insights come only when you give the human brain unstructured time to think. Opportunities for such freewheeling thought rarely present themselves amid the hustle and bustle of daily office life.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/jobs/in-defense-of-working-mostly-from-home.html

Lena Levin our current work policy is that remote working is possible, but is discouraged for caring purposes – it’s too hard to do caring or corporate work when you’re trying to do both at once.

I think the thing that I find discouraging about the more general cultural and business conversation when it comes to the issue of women and work Lena Levin is that the assumption is that it somehow is not a messy conversation…that somehow whatever “solution” will be neat and tidy and non-intrusive, to companies, to business and this is I think the essential lie. For, as you point out, children and families are messy and they are not easily put into boxes. Nor, when people are being honest about it, are businesses. It has long been a mistake that women have responded to the lack of understanding of this messiness by just removing themselves from the equation altogether so that, effectively, they wouldn’t get in anyone’s way. However, given that women have now edged ahead of men in the numbers of students getting their higher degrees, and are bringing up a significant amount of bacon to fry up in those pans, I think women are going to become less tolerant of the intolerance about the complexity of their lives. 

We can’t continue to have political candidates harp on about family values, while making it impossible for women to become a valuable part of the work force by denying the needs of working mothers. It’s absurd…

I don’t think it’s quite fair to say that “it impossible for women to become a valuable part of the work force”, because they already are, quite obviously.

Various solutions for making it easier to combine work and parenting exist and are tried and tested throughout virtually all other countries of the “first world”: mandatory longer parental leaves paid by special insurance funds (for both parents and for half a year or more at least), even longer guarantees of jobs, public and/or heavily subsidized daycare and after school hours with meaningful activities.

But all this doesn’t seem to be on anyone’s political agenda (not only politicians — no grassroots movements either).

I cannot really understand how you can say “there is no way”, given that there are so many who are doing it as we speak? It is harder, much harder than to do only one of those things, so, obviously, many would choose one, so long as they have a choice. It doesn’t mean that there is no way, it just means that this way is harder.

It is harder for men, as well: whether they choose to be stay-at-home fathers for a while, take the full burden of financial responsibility for the family, or jungle the kids between two working parents — I’ve seen all these strategies at work. That’s why there are many men who prefer not to have children at all.

It used to be easier when traditions of mutual help within extended families and small close-knit communities were stronger, but this will hardly ever return. So there will be less children, which is probably not such a bad thing, since the planet is already overpopulated.

Lena Levin comments that Ms. Gupta’s “unstructured time for thinking” is not necessarily available if you are working from home. It may well be wishful thinking if you are also caring for a child.

In the podcast cited above, John Dickerson argues for “forced solitude” in offices to complement an all-hands-on-deck culture. He describes it as a time where employees are “allowed to gather themselves, to ruminate, to consider and mull. And are forced to do that.”

People who work in open offices or cubicles though have challenges creating that structured solitude or unstructured time for thinking.

I have a fairly boring commute in a van pool where I don’t have to drive. It is a perfect time for unstructured thinking. I can also close the door to my office and shut off my ringer and email and get unstructured time for thinking. I find it easier to close my office door than, while working from home, to shut off the competing items around the house that need attention or the errands I could run because I’m rarely in town during business hours. 

Working from home may make more sense for those who can’t close a door and turn over communications to a secretary but I work from home only when I need to because of family.

Bill Abrams there is absolutely no solitude at my company. It’s cubicle life. There are very few offices because the real estate space doesn’t allow for them – they hog the space. Forced solitude for gathering one’s thoughts and creativity I can’t imagine in my wildest dreams. There are copy machines (Yes, businesses still use copy machines), there are cell phones going off all day long – for business, not personal – and the phones are ringing constantly – for business, not personal – and the conversation is non stop, talking to clients, talking to colleagues. There isn’t a silent moment and there couldn’t be. For me, as a writer, this was impossible. You cannot write a major speech when you are surrounded by noise.

I’m listening to the Slate Political Gab Fest – thank you so much for turning me onto it, I’ve never listened and I love it – as I write and the conversation is remarkably similar to this post, which is basically, that you can’t punish people in their lives who are trying to make the work/life balance thing work. I’ve been in business in New York for 30+ years and I can tell you I just don’t meet people who take advantage of home working situations. In fact, I work harder because I have an extra 3 hours to focus and concentrate than I have if I’m forced to go into the office.

That said, I know people who prefer one or the other. People are different. Some people need more private time and some people need to be with groups. The tendency to say it has to be one or the other is absurd. It’s like saying that if you are a writer — all good writing is done in the morning.

GM. The difference in the price of square footage of our office space may partially account for the different shadings you and I have on the issue of WFH. 

I’m glad you like Political Gabfest. Brian would probably enjoy Slate’s Hang Up and Listen. It is the same type of weekly conversational program, but focused on sports and featuring two of the most erudite commentators around: Stefan Fatsis and Mike Pesca. 

I agree that people change working styles and that people have different styles from each other.  I also think that companies have different cultures and customers have different expectations. WFH is not the best way for me to get most of my work done, but I’m happy to be able to make that decision. I’m happy that you can make that decision too. 

I wonder if we will ever get the full picture behind Ms. Mayer’s decision to restrict WFH. What problem she was addressing, why she picked that solution, why she gave three months notice rather than one or six, what she expected the reaction to be, whether she will modify the prohibition before or after June 1. The pressure surrounding each decision that she makes must be enormous. Her statements and actions are receiving the scrutiny ordinarily reserved for politicians. It is not a situation that encourages long term thinking or trying things out.

As to quarterly profits – much of the attention on working from home has been from the point of view of employees not from the point of view of shareholders. I think that Mayer is mostly the focus of the negative attention not Yahoo! and that there won’t be a massive sell-off. Today for example, amid a general down day for tech stocks, Yahoo!’s (how often does one get to follow an exclamation point with an apostrophe?) price rose by 3%.   If this were a company like, say, Raytheon, I don’t think people would even blink at this type of HR move. 

A side note, the first issue I dealt with this morning combined leave without pay, FMLA, and WFH. 

And yet another well-written article, this one with a one-liner that is great: It’s About the Work, Not the Office:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/08/opinion/in-defense-of-telecommuting.html?src=rechp

I wonder if the new policy will be refined before June when it takes effect or whether it will be refined after it serves it’s purpose.  The In Defense artilce linked to this one: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/technology/yahoos-in-office-policy-aims-to-bolster-morale.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0&ref=business

that contained the following observation about the situation Mayer faced when she came on board:

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.

And this about internal reactions: 

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.

The article also notes that the author of the new policy, Yahoo!’s HR director, commutes from NYC to Cali!

Finally, this nugget about external reaction:

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.

Giselle Minoli Good morning to you.  I think that you are right that Mayer may wish the discussion were elsewhere although I’d still be curious to see whether it has had any lasting positive effect on share prices. It occurs to me that Mayer, after she was on the job for a bit, probably discovered that Yahoo!’s esprit de corps was even worse than she suspected while she was being courted for the position and has been looking for ways to improve it. 

She may have detected a bit of resentment from some employees towards other employees that had work-at-home arrangements, but who didn’t appear to do much, and who also seemed to be double-dipping or working on non-Yahoo! projects while ostensibly on Yahoo! time. An easy way to deal with that is to identify any slackers and terminate them.  

Instead Mayer’s HR department may have suggested that a broad response to the problem – making every employee come to the office – would avoid making the 200 feel discriminated against.  If the 200 were disproportionately made up of a protected class, then legal counsel may have approved that approach. So she takes the advice and sends out an email (perhaps drafted by HR). 

Quickly, the negative attention piles up. If this was just internal, she might have adjusted the policy. But no, everything that Mayer does is scrutinized for evidence that she is not magically better than a man in her position would be, so an adjustment would be equally denigrated as weak, unsure, and inexperienced. Her managers are helping out at the margins by making compliance realistic rather than absolute.  

I think that the policy will be modified to once again allow incidental and extended work from home, but not until she can point to success – a more cohesive and engaged team. 

In The Atlantic, Anne-Marie Slaughter recounts her impressions from a week of speaking engagements around International Women’s Day earlier this month. From her stop at Novartis, comes this:

Novartis has many different flex policies, as many large corporations now do. But what was most interesting is that the application for flex-time is “reason-neutral.” Employees must show that working flexibly would be good for them and good for the business, but they do not state any reason why they want flex-time. It could be to take care of children or elderly parents, or it could be because an employee simply works better at home part of the time. The great advantage here is that parents, mothers in particular, are not singled out and stigmatized. Just as many colleges have “need-blind admissions,” corporations could move to “reason-neutral flexible work.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/03/there-are-lots-of-ways-to-help-make-men-and-women-truly-equal/274084/

Brian Titus Amen Ariana Huffington! “We have so many people making terrible decisions, despite the fact that they have high IQs and great degrees. If success doesn’t include your own health and happiness, then what is it?” 

I am sick of it. But I’ve been sick of it for a long time. One of the huge problems, if not the problem with the Women’s Movement is that men had made the rules for what it meant to be successful and women felt they needed to fit into that system. Part of the reason they have failed to do that (18 female CEOs at the Fortune 500 companies????) is that it doesn’t work for women. I would argue that it doesn’t work for men either, else why is there a global banking crisis (why didn’t globalization work to begin with?), why was there a mortgage crisis in this country, why are there so many failed institutions, why is there such lack of balance? Men (this is an observation more than a criticism) treat business like sports: everything is a competition – more wins, bigger stadiums, more sponsors…then more wins, bigger stadiums…and more sponsors.

Brian, it can’t be only the women who are questioning this. It’s got to be the men, too, and they’ve got to stop being afraid that if they introduce this thing called balance that they will lose and someone else will win. It’s crazy.

I would argue that it doesn’t work for men either…

Giselle Minoli, the evil ‘beauty’ of our current system is that it is almost impossible to argue this point. My wife and I have been talking about this overall topic over the last few weeks; as a successful women in a typically male-dominated career field, she knows first-hand about all these issues. However, as I try to make the “meta” argument that the whole system doesn’t work, even though part of her agrees, I think another part of her rejects it, almost viscerally. Because as I’m saying it, it sure sounds like I’m trying to put myself in a boat that — as a man — I’ve never really had to be in. And yes, it sounds like it’s crazy.

And, just to bring in another tangent we’ve been talking about, we have this article, also from NYTimes (and the book Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us):

The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food

Read the opening section about the 1999 food CEO “summit” at Pillsbury and let’s talk about what “leadership” then might have meant to our country 14 years later.

“Sanger was trying to say, ‘Look, we’re not going to screw around with the company jewels here and change the formulations because a bunch of guys in white coats are worried about obesity.’ ”

The meeting was remarkable, first, for the insider admissions of guilt. But I was also struck by how prescient the organizers of the sit-down had been. Today, one in three adults is considered clinically obese, along with one in five kids, and 24 million Americans are afflicted by type 2 diabetes, often caused by poor diet, with another 79 million people having pre-diabetes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html

Wait, Giselle Minoli I thought you were going to solve it all, in-flight! 🙂

I should try to take my cynic hat off once in a while, but sometimes it’s difficult. Especially this week being the 10th anniversary of the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom — another great moment in leadership.

Normally when articles like this are published, people say things like “you know, if she was a man, they would be praising her for her toughness and ability to get things done.”

I would just like to say, reading about this “style” of management — regardless of gender — makes me sad. Why do we seem to feel that “leadership” means treating people so poorly?

Offstage, Quinn Isn’t Afraid to Let Fury Fly

By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM and DAVID W. CHEN

NYTimes

As she pursues a high-profile bid for mayor, Ms. Quinn, a Democrat, has proudly promoted her boisterous personality, hoping that voters will embrace her blend of brashness and personal charm.

But in private, friends and colleagues say, another Ms. Quinn can emerge: controlling, temperamental and surprisingly volatile, with a habit of hair-trigger eruptions of unchecked, face-to-face wrath.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/26/nyregion/in-private-quinn-displays-a-volatile-side.html

I appreciate you posting this +Bill and I will read it with interest! Thank you….

GM, I’m just curious to see how the company culture pans out after being part of this conversation. The earnings report  shows profits up while revenue is down. Not sure if a 19% drop in the workforce over the past year is evidenced in that number, but it is interesting to note that profits are up over last quarter even while the company has been on a bit of a buying spree (remember Summly?). 

Sorry,, we cross posted and then I had to step out on a little Dad taxi run. I don’t think the report was a plant. I assume the stuff that was emphasized was carefully chosen.

The employee drop was over the course of a year.  It doesn’t say how many have left since her announcement curtailing remote working (which itself doesn’t take effect until June). The tripling of resumes though was during the last quarter. So it was within the context of an influx that she made her decision (assuming HR provided her with that tidbit).  

It will be interesting to see if they continue to talk about incoming resumes when this quarter’s report comes out or whether her announcement will have a depressing effect on the number of people who want to work there.

19% drop in workforce sounds like ‘job one’ was a big cost-reduction effort. So I’m thinking this is spin to make that sound nice.

Bill Abrams we spoke about this seemingly so long ago now, almost two years in fact, but in case you didn’t catch this article, I thought I’d ping you in. I found it interesting reading…two years in, about Mayer’s progress:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-when-marissa-mayer-tried-to-be-steve-jobs.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3As%2C%7B%222%22%3A%22RI%3A13%22%7D