Marissa Mayer. She's doing this right. It's the velvet glove on the iron fist. She starts with food and modern cell phones. She tosses out the bad execs. She eliminates the dumb trademark symbols on all the physical signage. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief – these changes are good news.
The message is clear: your boss knows what you need and wants to take care of you.
But she's not all cupcakes and kisses.
With the tone set properly, she identifies the dead wood. From what I hear, shitloads of people are checked out at Yahoo. That's a cultural problem that's tough to lift. Imagine being checked out and outside of the day-to-day social nudges that keep you feeling a little bit like your job expectations have consequence.
Mayer's an optimizer. Years at Google taught her all about getting the best ROI from the simplest operation. With one stroke, she can identify who really cares about Yahoo's mission and who is just along for the free gravy train. Yahoo isn't going to get out of trouble by casually, lazily sidling to the promised land.
It's going to take work. And now the boss wants a sign of commitment to that work.
The hysteria about this move is misplaced. She nailed it. Great call.
"Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer built a nursery in her office so she could bring her baby to work, which has angered some stay-at-home employees following her demand that all remote workers report back to the office.
'I wonder what would happen if my wife brought our kids and nanny to work and set em up in the cube next door?' the husband of one remote-working Yahoo employee asked in an interview with AllThingsD's Kara Swisher.
Many employees are upset because they don't have the money or clout to build their own nurseries at work. And many assume Mayer has a whole team of people, from nannies to cooks and cleaners, helping her raise her son - after all, she does have a $5 million penthouse atop the Four Seasons hotel in San Francisco in addition to her $5.2 million 5-bedroom home in Palo Alto."
I don't get it. She's building the nursery at the office, how does that contradict a no-working-from-home policy? She's explicitly not working from home.
Rank-and-file don't get nurseries in their office? Ok, they don't get a CEO salary and responsibilities, either. That's life.
When you, alone, have the power to turn a company around, you get more or less anything necessary to ensure your success.
Let's be real.
This isn't CEO camp. Not everyone gets a turn.
Mayer is special. She's got a kid on the way. I'm sure the shareholders would prefer she not have to choose between saving Yahoo and raising her kid. If employees were able to deliver similar levels of value, I'm sure they'd be first in line for their own special accommodations.
How is it related to being a CEO, though? Fact is, Mayer had a child. She realised that in order to be effective in the office, she needed a nursery, so that she could be close to her child while also working.
Why does the same not apply to Yahoo employees with young children? Mayer may be CEO, but the logic she used to install a nursery would apply to all employees.
There is a cost associated with the accommodation (which Mayer was uniquely able to pay for). There's limited physical space. There are practical considerations.
Other employees don't deliver enough value to tip the equation in favor of the accommodation. If tier-4 person has a nursery, you get a marginally better contribution four tiers down. If Mayer has a nursery, she potentially turns Yahoo into a fiercely competitive organization.
Is it fair? No. It's business.
Hell, why not give everyone a corner office? Give everyone a private jet? Y'know?
Exactly. Eliminating working from home punishes those who need the option most, Yahoo moms and dads.
Just for the record:
- The US is the only industrialized nation not to mandate paid leave for mothers of newborns
- The US is one of only three nations — rich and poor - that doesn't guarantee job-protected time off with some amount of income after the birth of a child
- New parents in the U.S. are guaranteed their jobs for 12 weeks after the arrival of a new baby, thanks to the Family Medical Leave Act of 1993, but they do not have to be paid during that time and exemptions apply for small companies.
- California provides 60% pay for 12 weeks
- UK provides 90% pay for 280 days, Russia 100% pay for 140 days, Spain & France & Netherlands 100% pay for 112 days, Germany 100% pay for 98 days, China 100% pay for 90 days
Letting people work from home doesn't help a person do their job if they still have to look after the child(ren). You might get a couple hours work done at nap time but otherwise young kids require all hands on deck.
And one day, when Yahoo is very successful and has a trusted, properly incentivized workforce, I am certain they will explore such accommodation. In the meantime, homegirl is running a turnaround; the French Resistance didn't have featherbeds.
It's hardly as if Yahoo employees don't have other places they could go. At a time when tech companies are falling over each other to persuade people to work for them, turning off prospective employees seems like a turnaround all right.
I think the logic behind the nursery probably does apply to most Yahoo employees with young children. But that's an argument for on-site day care (does Yahoo offer it?), not working from home.
So the drones have to sacrifice their benefits to drive up the share price, but the C-suite gets extravagant bespoke benefits because they're delivering value...by tearing up other people's benefits.
It is good work if you can get it. So is getting $10M a year to play basketball. If you have the rare talents that our 21st century economy demands from the top performers, a nursery in your office is the least of the perks you get.
If you have the less rare but still valuable talents of a yahoo programmer, you get no jet or crèche but you get six figures and free soda.
If you live in Detroit and know how to make fasteners, you get less than that in most cases today.
If you live in Somalia, well...
Fair it may not be, but I'm not crying for the poor Yahoo lead developer who has to go to the office now. It's a cold, cold world.
The whole point is that cutting other people's benefits, salaries and jobs is not a talent at all. A robot built to mimic the average private-equity or management consulting firm could easily determine that brave, stringent cuts to employee compensation desperately need to be made, since that's what they always say.
Who cares? It's not her job to be fair, or to coddle the Yahoo employees.
The point of the article is the working remotely is built on trust; if you break the trust, you lose the privilege.
The whole thing screams of entitlement to me. Just because someone else has something, doesn't mean you deserve it too. If you want it, work for it and do it yourself.
I see this all the time and it makes no sense. Mayer has not eliminated maternity leave. She eliminated working from home. They are not the same thing.
You cannot work full time from home AND take care of a newborn baby. Anyone who has been at home with a newborn knows this. Working from home is about flexibility and focus, not cheaping out on child care. If you work from home, you still need someone to watch your kid(s). If you are watching your kids, you're not working to the same extent you would in the office.
So yeah, Marissa created a situation so that she could come back to work way earlier than most new moms do. I bet the board of Yahoo prefers that to a CEO who takes her federally-mandated 3 months of family leave.
So build an onsite nursery onsite for all the working moms! This is a great idea! Though I'm sure they get maternity leave so its a bit superfluous (mayers isn't taking hers, I guess). But we can generalize into onsite pre-school care, that would be cool (or they could hand out subsidies, it might be cheaper).
She is in a turn-around situation. Want the same results? Keep doing the same things. So instead: Shake up everything. See who reacts well and can adjust, see who can't adjust to even minor changes. If you can't handle lifestyle changes while making way the hell above median income then the company can probably apply your salary to more effective purposes than feathering your nest.
Except nothing has changed at the top. In fact, she's getting paid even more than the previous CEO with a package worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Maybe its the Board of Directors who need some shaking up.
Yeah...sure... Because all those unproductive work from home employees are going to be super productive once they get in the office. No way they'll slack off there, browsing the web or come up with meetins and excuses.
And the risk of the move is that the "slackers" aren't the only ones who will quit. The productive work-from-home employees might quit, too. After all, they're the ones who are most likely to resent the change in policy. If you were slacking you could easily be unhappy about the change, but you're unlikely to feel it is "unfair". The productive employees might even be more likely to quit - especially if they're the ones most confident of their ability to find another job.
It could go either way. Time will tell, I suppose.
No, a brilliant move would be to fire people who didn't do their jobs, and to fire the managers who let that happen.
You really think the people who suck at their jobs are going to quit? Maybe some of them, others will move to the office and slack off. You know who will quit for sure? People who are getting a lot done at home, and realize they can work at another company that pays better and/or lets them work at home.
My wife was just asking me tonight to summarize the whole issue for her and the first question that came to her mind was "well, are the remotes being offered relocation expenses?"
Haven't seen one lick of a mention about this. I'm guessing the answer is a hearty NO?
In my experience slackers rarely quit, they keep clinging to their jobs like their life depended on it, doing just the bare minimum to avoid getting fired. While your point might have been Yahoos intention, they might get the reverse result. The deadwood piling into HQ and much of the top talent leaving because they have better options.
Actually it seems a large part of the expectation is that many slackers will prefer quitting to commuting. This would allow Yahoo to get rid of the unproductive and/or hire actual productive people in their place, with little effort. I don't think anybody's really expecting people who have become comfortable with slacking off, to suddenly not be slackers in an office environment. Sounds like a smart move.
MM's choices have made perfect sense to me. A lot of commenters don't seem to realize just how bad Yahoo's situation is, and how much of a task Mayer is trying to accomplish. It's true that a lot of her decisions wouldn't make sense at normal, functional companies-but Yahoo isn't a functional company, so policies like no working from home or approving every hire make sense.
Sorry but have you EVER worked at a large company before ?
Because none of what you said makes any sense. There is no evidence that people at Yahoo are more or less "checked out" than any company. And it is ridiculous to think she can magically weed out those select few who are not committed to the company's mission.
And this underlying assumption that there is a relationship between working remotely and productivity/innovation is simply unproven. Especially when you realise that much of the innovation in our industry comes from open source projects where everyone is disconnected.
Were you working for or do you work for Yahoo? The allegations of rampant abuse of the work-from-home system in TFA is some sort of evidence, at least.
And frankly, relating open-source software to productivity in a big company is a worse argument that what people have been saying about productivity and working remotely.
If you don't have some correlation coefficient between working from home and lack of productivity then your entire argument is moot. My point with open source software is that there are plenty of facts on the ground that working from home does not necessarily equate to a lack of innovation. I was proving the negative.
She doesn't need a correlation when there is direct relation between those who work from home and those who didn't even bother logging in to the damn VPN. It's easier to make everyone come in than try to suss out who is and isn't getting their work done when their positions keep no tabs on it (actually, she should just cut that dead weight outright, saving her the trouble of her Friday FYIs).
If executive decisions were made solely by productivity stats we could be running the entire economy on some pocket calculator. Just look at research papers and how they "measure" innovation. In innovation centric research that is frequently done by easy accessible data such as the number of patents submitted by a certain company. Do you really want to make your decision based on hard "evidence" like that?
Using open source software as a counterexample is not a good idea, since we don't have the foggiest idea what the rate of success is. What percentage of people who sit down to produce open source software are actually successful, and what percentage just read HN/Reddit instead? Is it 10%? 1%? 0.1%? We never hear about the failures, so who knows.
> If you don't have some correlation coefficient between working from home and lack of productivity then your entire argument is moot.
You're arguing on an internet forum about a CEO's decision about a multi-billion dollar company. The article in question is from TechCrunch. You need a reality check.
The coefficient you're asking for will never be available to the general public. You know this. In effect, you are saying that if numbers aren't made public supporting an argument, that argument can not be made. Unfortunately, most important debates don't have relevant data. Are most debates moot? I suspect most of your cherished beliefs are also "moot" by this ridiculous standard.
> My point with open source software is that there are plenty of facts on the ground that working from home does not necessarily equate to a lack of innovation.
Open source developers are motivated for entirely different reasons than full-time Yahoos. Red Hat is the only company that could start to make a good comparison. Data on this doesn't actually exist. This is a ridiculous point to make.
> I was proving the negative.
You have proved nothing. Nobody ever will here, because the amount of information we have is the tiniest sliver of what actually matters: data on Yahoo employees working from home.
> If you disagree. Then provide some numbers.
This is not a "lets compare numbers" discussion. You cannot "win" this one. Let's stop trying to be "right", okay taligent? You have an opinion, but your opinion actually has no more weight than any one else's opinion here.
And this underlying assumption that there is a relationship between working remotely and productivity/innovation is simply unproven. Especially when you realise that much of the innovation in our industry comes from open source projects where everyone is disconnected.
(And for what it's worth - the two folk I know at Yahoo! (in different groups) are both going "fuck yeah - about time" on these changes and both of them /want/ to telecommute. That says something about how fked up remote working is at the organisation. Both have gone from cynicism to enthusiasm over the last six months of Mayer's rein. They're really smart folk and could walk into dev jobs in SV - and they both now /want/ to stay with Yahoo! I see lots of people saying what a terrible decision this is. I see very few of those complaints being attributed to folk who actually work there.)
Marissa Mayer. She's doing this right. It's the velvet glove on the iron fist. She starts with food and modern cell phones. She tosses out the bad execs. She eliminates the dumb trademark symbols on all the physical signage. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief – these changes are good news.
The message is clear: your boss knows what you need and wants to take care of you.
But she's not all cupcakes and kisses.
With the tone set properly, she identifies the dead wood. From what I hear, shitloads of people are checked out at Yahoo. That's a cultural problem that's tough to lift. Imagine being checked out and outside of the day-to-day social nudges that keep you feeling a little bit like your job expectations have consequence.
Mayer's an optimizer. Years at Google taught her all about getting the best ROI from the simplest operation. With one stroke, she can identify who really cares about Yahoo's mission and who is just along for the free gravy train. Yahoo isn't going to get out of trouble by casually, lazily sidling to the promised land.
It's going to take work. And now the boss wants a sign of commitment to that work.
The hysteria about this move is misplaced. She nailed it. Great call.