Ideas Exchange
"To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home."
Marissa Mayer, CEO, Yahoo!
The brave new world of distancing oneself physically from the workplace through the communication and transference method of the Internet has had its day. It was felt that the corporate footstep of infrastructure would be reduced and costs nicely contained when employees could be depended upon to work from home, using computer and communications technology.
It would free up money and time for both corporations and their employees, making work-private-life a more manageable and useful collaborative adaptation to the need to balance the public against the private. And for a while it seemed to work very well. And then it was realized that isolation hampered exchange of ideas and creativity suffered while the technical end of things hummed along nicely.
All very good, except that the future depends on forward-thinking innovation and advanced technological procedures greatly enhanced by people of vision having access to other minds of like process. Some useful collaboration takes place, without a doubt, despite distances when instant communications links peoples' minds but that close physical proximity and the vision and the spark linking ideas was set aside.
And then throw in human nature and the temptations when there is no one around to urge task completion and excellence, to lose sight of the separation between work life and private life. Even if deadlines are met and the work completed to satisfaction it usually represents routine, complementary work, not that far more elusive breakthrough of human innovation.
So while Marissa Mayer, the CEO who has it all, position, respect, trust, imagination and capability, along with her private life which she can at will introduce into her working life in a reversal of working from home by self-funding a nursery alongside her office at Yahoo! for baby and minder, solving her personal dilemma, she is role-reversing for those who have grown fond of telecommuting.
Coming in as the first female CEO at Yahoo! Ms. Mayer recognized a culture of "people slacking off like crazy, not being available, and spending a lot of time on non-Yahoo! projects", according to a source, confiding to Business Insider. Attempts to lure staff back to the fold with enticements elicited little response. So she issued a bald ultimatum: leave the comfort of home and join the commute dragging yourself into the office to produce a day's work for a day's pay.
The criticism came flying in fast and furious. A lot of people upset, not just those whose fondness for telecommuting now faced up to the reality of ditching it or losing employment, but outsiders who all have a stake in the future of how their own corporations would ultimately shape up under this new-old work-life conundrum reversing itself.
After the indignant denunciations, other responses began to filter in to comment on the situation, and they were representative of a more reasoned approach.
"The reality is that you have to choose to be with your kids or have a high powered career. I think we're all just really disappointed we're not going to be the high performers our parents told us we would be.
"You can't advance in a company by telecommuting. It's what people do after they have kids, to hold onto their place. It's what young people do if they don't have huge career aspirations", commented Penelope Trunk of Brazen Careerist.
Labels: Human Relations, Internet, Marketing, Political Realities, Research, Technology
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, March 03, 2013
<< Home