The truth about working at home

Some people think Marissa Mayer’s edict last week that all Yahoo employees must come into the office signals a tipping point. If a Silicon Valley company is clamping down, it will set off a domino effect that causes employers everywhere to kill touchy-feely work-at-home policies. Pull up your socks and come into the office, slackers!

But now that reports have surfaced indicating remote Yahoo employees weren’t logging in, it seems pretty clear Mayer’s decision was specific to Yahoo and its travails. Mayer’s move has no real implications for telecommuting in general, which continues to rise in popularity. 

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When you acknowledge the truth about working at home, it’s easy to see why the trend is thriving. If you have a white collar job — and especially if you work in IT — you probably have little real time off at all. In many cases, working at home is one side of an unspoken bargain that goes something like this: I know you’re working (or at least on call) most of your waking hours, so in exchange you can spend a certain percentage of the traditional 9-to-5 work time at home.

And several studies have shown this bargain seems to benefit everyone. According to a 2010 study of 24,436 IBM employees by Brigham Young University, people worked longer hours and had higher morale when telecommuting was permitted. In the wake of Mayer’s decision, it’s popular to quote a recent Stanford study of a Chinese travel agency that showed a 13 percent improvement in the performance of home workers. A 2011 Dice survey even revealed that 35 percent of respondents would be willing to take a 10 percent pay cut in order to telecommute.

The modern world of work The fact is that the 40-hour workweek has been dead for maybe 20 or 30 years. With the hours most people pull today, you might conclude that business management has triumphed and the majority of exempt employees are effectively locked in a kind of off-hours servitude whether they realize it or not.

Or you could say that the line between work and personal life has blurred beyond recognition — and maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Personally, I think it’s false to maintain the fiction that my job doesn’t exist when I’m with my family, and I would quit in a heartbeat if I were banned from messaging or talking to my family when I’m in the office. People are not automatons who switch back and forth between personal and work modes. In general, the option to work at home one day a week — or more, if child care is an issue — mixes things up in a healthy way.

Inside or outside the office, few people can produce knowledge work heads-down for hours and hours with just a lunch break day after day. Spreading work out without a hard line between “on” and “off” hours can yield greater productivity and higher quality of work.

Case in point: A couple of years ago I interviewed the CEO of a small company who described his reaction when he saw the internal user activity reports from a new application monitoring system. “At first, it was really depressing,” he said. “They’re spending that much time on Facebook during the day? Then I saw the log times showing people working in the wee hours and on weekends. Altogether, they were working much longer than regular working hours.”

It’s all about results But don’t some people just screw off when they work at home? Sure they do. Some people screw off at the office, too, although they have to work a little harder to keep up appearances.

Inside or outside of the office, it’s all about instituting objectives and measures while cultivating an atmosphere of trust and respect. The bottom line is that you need clear goals and effective appraisal of performance regardless of where an employee works. Treating people right makes them self-motivated — an invaluable trait.

It seems pretty obvious that people management has been a problem at Yahoo. In a company with low morale that has spent years drifting, when people work at home a certain number of them — particularly those lacking clear direction — may just cynically collect a paycheck.

In such a situation, some serious face time may be required. It’s not just about meetings being better when everyone is actually in the room rather than dialing in; that depends on the type of meeting and on how that meeting is handled. But one thing is certain: “Come-to-Jesus” meetings must be conducted face to face.

From the outside, it seems obvious Yahoo as a company is in the midst of a full-on come-to-Jesus episode, so what Mayer is doing may well be justified. I hope that if and when Yahoo revitalizes itself, Mayer will be in a position to reinstate a work-at-home policy — one of the few bright spots in the modern world of work.

This article, “The truth about working at home,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Eric Knorr’s Modernizing IT blog. And for the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld on Twitter.