Well, happy Monday morning, Yahoo employees. Looks like your telecommuting days have come to an end.
Silicon Valley firms are known for cushy perks: free food, bringing your dog to work and so on. But starting in June, Yahoo employees will lose the benefit of working from home. According to an internal memo leaked on Friday to The Wall Street Journal’s AllThingsD.com by numerous disgruntled Yahoo employees, the new policy calls for workers “physically being together.”
“We need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices… Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home,” reads the memo from Jacqueline Reses, a private equity veteran brought on board by Mayer in September to be the company’s HR boss.
You can always count on those humorless “Human” Resources folks to rain on the parade with their one-size-fits all policies. They don’t worry much about the “human” side of things. That’s why you hear them referring to “humans” as “talent”. They’re into “talent acquisition”, “talent management”, and “talent development”. Then, at the end of your “talent life cycle”, there’s “talent disposal”. When your “HR” people aren’t even part of your own organization, they’re free to do their best work, unconstrained by the possibility of having actually met (or – heaven forbid – become attached to) the employees.
For anyone who thought that CEO Marissa Mayer would continue the generally people-friendly policies of her previous workplace (Google), you can kiss that sh*t goodbye. She’s clearly focused on the bottom line, and if you’re not riding the profitability bus to the end of the line with her, you’d best get off right now.
Ms. Mayer is clearly a business-first type of person, having returned to work as the CEO within a few weeks of giving birth. Then again, she has the resources to enable her to do so. Most of us don’t have a nanny, housekeeper, errand person, personal shopper, dog walker, or other domestic staff on our payroll.
She’s also shrewd enough to realize that the best way to make the bottom line look better in the near term is to cut costs. The biggest costs are usually those pesky employees. Laying them off, though, is a costly business, what with severance pay and all that paperwork. However… if you can get them all to quit on their own out of anger, frustration, and resentment, it’s a work of pure genious.
As a veteran of 37 years in corporate America, and veteran telecommuter, your intrepid diarist has a few ideas about this misbegotten Yahoo plan. Follow along below for more…