Marissa
Mayer has ordered an end to 'remote' work as all staff are told to be in the
office as part of a new era of collaboration
The Guardian, Charles Arthur, technology editor, 25 February 2013
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Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has left hundreds of staff facing the tough choice of relocating from home to Yahoo's nearest office by June - or quitting. Photograph: Peter Kramer/AP |
Surfing the
web from at home might be just what Yahoo's chief Marissa Mayer wants her
audience to do – but she has banned employees of the company itself from
working "remotely", in an edict sent out last Friday to Yahoo's
thousands of staff.
Several
hundred staff must now relocate their home offices to Yahoo's nearest office
outpost by June – or quit, as the former Google chief gets serious about
getting the company's staff back into "meat space" so it can be a
contender in the web space.
The memo
from human resources chief Jackie Reses – but driven by Mayer – says that
"to become the absolute best place to work, communication and
collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is
why it is critical that we are all present in our offices."
But the
mood of Yahoo's 11,500 employees – down from 14,100 at the end of 2011 – can be
guessed from the fact that the memo is marked: "PROPRIETARY AND
CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION – DO NOT FORWARD" and that it has been forwarded to the news site AllThingsD by "a plethora" of staff, according to
senior editor Kara Swisher, who broke the story.
The memo
points out that even those who only work one or two days in the office will
have to submit to the new regime. But it seems that what Mayer has in mind is
the provision of more water coolers and coffee machines: "Some of the best
decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new
people, and impromptu team meetings," it says. "Speed and quality are
often sacrificed when we work from home."
Mayer was hired in secret and took over in July 2012, and soon afterwards announced that
she would be having her first child – which was duly born in October. Mayer
however eschewed maternity leave to go straight back to work.
Having won
a number of awards – including being ranked in the "Top 50 Best Places to
Work" by Business Insider in 2013, and "Top 500 Green Companies"
by Newsweek in 2010 – Yahoo may find itself winning another, for "biggest
group of suddenly annoyed professionals". Although the memo says that
"Being a Yahoo isn't just about your day-to-day job", a number are
now wondering if it might be exactly that.
One former
Yahoo worker commenting at AllThingsD said that working from home made them far
more productive than being in the office: "Why? I didn't have to put up
with numbskull self-important programmers constantly yakking to each other
LOUDLY from the next set of cubicles about non-work-related stuff, and I wasn't
being distracted every 20 minutes by some bored soul coming over to my desk to
go for coffee or foosball, or just to talk about the spreading ennui of knowing
we were working for a company whose glory days were long over."
The UK
press office declined to say whether staff here will be affected: "we do
not comment on internal matters," a spokesman said.
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