I am finding the Yahoo having no work from home employees discussion curious – and likely just a media creation. To ask a question: which is more productive:
- Working in an office with others of my group.
- Normal functioning office where I am free to work with whomever as necessary.
- Politicized office where I sit at a desk, do as I’m told and really have no freedom whatsoever.
- Function specific office in which I only sit with people like me who actually just cause massive Groupthink.
- Working at home with collaborative tools.
- Normal functioning where I’m expected to collaborate to get work done – possibly some travel to enable.
- Politicized management structure where I do as I’m told but am constantly in fear of how my manager is discussing me while I’m not around.
- Introverted work team where no one wants to talk unless in the same room.
The answer is it depends on the company and environment. Either or neither could work. Some companies are destined to be productive and others never will be.
It all comes down to culture still. For some companies work from home will work and for others it won’t. Still others (such as NSN and McAfee) have converted their culture to such an extent globally that virtual collaboration is a requirement even when in the office so there is almost no difference between work from home and work from office.
Yahoo probably has a highly politicized culture at this point given their history over the past few years (dysfunctional would be putting it lightly). It wouldn’t surprise me that this move is a necessary step to get their culture back to normal. But I wouldn’t take this as a reflection of an industry or worker type by any means.
This news story is along the lines of discussing the BlackBerry 10 as a technical innovation. No- it’s about a company struggling to survive that is lost adrift. They finally have a CEO willing to make the hard decisions to try to fix what is broken and some media and expert outlets are reading too much into it.