Op-Ed Contributor
It’s About the Work, Not the Office
By JENNIFER GLASS
Published: March 7, 2013
AUSTIN, Tex.
Kris Mukai
Room for Debate
Out of the Office, on the Clock
Marissa Mayer of Yahoo wants all her employees to work in the office, not from home. Is she moving in the wrong direction?
Related
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Yahoo Orders Home Workers Back to the Office (February 26, 2013)
Related in Opinion
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Editorial: Location, Location, Location (March 3, 2013)
THE recent decision
by Marissa Mayer, the chief executive of Yahoo, to eliminate
telecommuting for all workers brings her company back in line with most
of corporate America, where working from home is more illusion than
reality. Although many — some estimate most — American jobs could
successfully be performed at home, only roughly 16 percent of American
employees actually telecommute in any given year. And that figure is
reached only by using a very generous definition of telecommuting —
working from home at least one hour per week.
The idea behind the Yahoo announcement, as well as a more limited announcement from Best Buy
this week that will add restrictions to its telecommuting policy, was
that bringing workers back to the office would lead to greater
collaboration and innovation. This is despite numerous studies showing
that telecommuting workers are more productive than those working
on-site.
Yet a work force culture based on long hours at the office with little
regard for family or community does not inevitably lead to strong
productivity or innovation. Two outdated ideas seem to underlie
the Yahoo decision: first, that tech companies can still operate like
the small groups of 20-something engineers that founded them; and
second, the most old-fashioned of all, that companies get the most out
of their employees by limiting their autonomy.
Consider the reality of telecommuting in the United States: most of the
telecommuting hours put in by managers and professionals occur after
they have worked at least 40 hours at the office. For them, working from
home means checking e-mail, returning calls and writing reports during
evenings, weekends and vacations.
I suspect Yahoo is not keen on eradicating that type of telecommuting,
which increases work hours and squeezes ever greater productivity from
workers. Its change was aimed at eliminating the type of telecommuting
that substitutes for time spent at the office and that gives employees
the opportunity to avoid long commutes and design their work hours
around family or community obligations.
Why are companies so leery of this type of flexibility? Managers are
tempted to use “face time” in the office as the de facto measurement of
commitment and productivity. They are often suspicious about employees
who work out of sight, believing they will shirk or drift if not under
constant supervision. As a result, telecommuting is often viewed as a
perk to be handed out after employees have proved their worth.
But another important reason may be the difficulty of developing
reliable metrics to measure the performances of employees who work at
home, especially when they are involved in team projects. We tend to
attribute quality work to those we see all the time and with whom we
discuss work performance and accomplishments.
This belief may be especially strong at tech companies, whose heady
early days of creative innovation suggested that living at the office
with your young peers produced the fastest results. What we tend to
forget is that many unsuccessful tech companies also started that way,
and that even the successful ones eventually had to grow beyond the
boundaries of a group of friends pulling all-nighters of inventive
exploration, getting a new platform or search architecture to work.
After all, Yahoo now has 14,000 employees — it’s hard to imagine that
all of them have a mission to innovate and create new processes and
products. These are customer service representatives, technical repair
workers. Does Yahoo really want them creatively innovating, going off
script with untested solutions?
Regardless, employees, creative or not, get older, marry, bear children,
watch their parents grow infirm, and want lives outside the workplace.
And despite companies’ best efforts to replace family and simulate home
life by providing cafeterias, game rooms and concierge services for dry
cleaning, most people eventually learn the hard way that companies will
not care for you when times are hard; they will cut your pay or forgo
your 401(k) match in economic downturns, and will dispose of you when
you become ill or disabled. As Robert Frost reminds us, home is the
place where they have to take you in. Work is not that place.
In the last week, I have heard a number of claims that research supports
the idea that workers on-site are more innovative than those who work
from home. I remain skeptical. The notion that impromptu conversations
with colleagues in the cafeteria are the core of innovation seems a bit
simplistic; in my experience, they are just as likely to produce talk of
better jobs at competing firms or last night’s “American Idol” winner.
Besides, much of this “research” simply shows that workers who
collaborate with others in loose networks generate better ideas. It
doesn’t suggest that the best way to create new products and services is
by isolating your employees in the silo of a single location.
It is no coincidence that some of the most successful engines of
innovation in our economy are our great research universities. Yet I
have never seen a single university administrator try to corral faculty
members into more face time at the office. Instead, researchers are
encouraged to travel to conferences to meet with peers and find out the
latest developments in their fields, and to use technology to maintain
contact with a web of associates around the globe who can be mustered on
demand for consultation and support.
To give one small example, two of my colleagues, at Cornell University, a
demographer and geographer, recently came up with the idea for a study
to improve the retention of women working in science while chatting
during their children’s after-school swim lessons. Even within Cornell,
stuck in their respective units, they might never have met. The logic
that insists that the best new ideas come from staying within one’s
company walls as long as possible sounds like a return to the corporate
groupthink of an earlier era.
Were there other ways to foster collaboration within Yahoo? Of course.
Ms. Mayer could have insisted on core work hours or days for all
employees, when everyone works on-site. Or Yahoo could have developed
collaborative work spaces off-site, closer to the neighborhoods where
telecommuting employees live, to provide them with opportunities to
connect to others doing similar work. Large screens to Skype in
telecommuting team members for daily or weekly meetings could be a
routine part of every group space. Above all, managers could focus on a
results-oriented system of evaluation for all employees, telecommuting
or not. This sends the message that outcomes are more important than
location or hours on the job.
If the Dilbertization of Yahoo actually improves innovation, I’ll change
my tune. But companies like Yahoo will not get more out of their
employees by watching them like hawks and monitoring their every move.
Nor can they recreate the dynamism of their founding moment by trying to
return to a perpetual organizational adolescence. The 37-year-old Ms.
Mayer, new mother, may have yet to learn that.
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