Sweet Marissa. Don’t let her angelic looks fool you, Marissa Mayer is brilliant, driven and as tough as nails. Mayer, the first female engineer at Google, rose up the management ladder at the search engine company before being named the CEO of Yahoo!. Six months into her tenure as Yahoo! CEO Mayer has sparked a mini-controversy by banning telecommuting. Reaction to Mayer’s edict has been decidedly mixed. The Atlantic and some at Forbes commended Mayer. Bloomberg contributor Kirsten Salyer called the move “risky.” Obviously, the future of telecommuting is inexorably tied to the future of transportation.
Do as we say, not as we do. Big American technology companies make the hardware and software that enable telecommuting Yet these same companies often go out of their way to get their employees to come to the office. Google and Facebook run free Wi-Fi equipped buses for their employees to get from their homes in San Francisco to the offices in the valley. They offer other perks as well. I can say from experience that the free food at the Google cafeterias is excellent. Facebook occasionally declares lock-downs where engineers spend night and day working at the office. This was documented by Fortune magazine in a lengthy article. The description included, “After word leaked that Google was starting work on a “Facebook killer” in summer 2010, Zuckerberg called on engineers to work nights and weekends for 60 days to revamp key social features like photos, groups, and events. Just as it did then, the cafeteria opened up on evenings and weekends this summer, and children dropped in for dinners and good-night hugs before their parents logged back on for late nights.”
On the road again. Human settlement pattern experts have long heralded telecommuting as a major reason to question the need for new roads. Once people telecommute rather than physically commute, they reason, there won’t be a rush hour and the added road capacity will go to waste. So, what should we make of Ms. Mayer’s anti-telecommuting stance? Remember, Ms. Mayer is not some crusty sixty-something working at a K St law firm. She is a tech-savvy 37 year old in Silicon Valley.
The perils of extrapolation. Marissa Mayer is fighting to restore the luster Yahoo! once had. It may be an error to extrapolate Yahoo!’s decision into a social trend. However, almost all of the technology companies that champion telecommuting also seem to have huge corporate campuses. Microsoft, Oracle, Google and Telepresence-maker Cisco have gigantic physical work environments. There is something very powerful in having a group of creative engineers standing at a white board “riffing” ideas. It seems that the jury is still out on the extent to which telecommuting can be practiced.
Rippert’s Read. I think it would be a major mistake to assume significant increases in telecommuting when considering future transportation requirements. This is especially true for areas where technology and innovation are critical to long term economic success. As Northern Virginia makes the transition from government supported industry to a more mixed public and private economy there will be a need for in-person collaboration. The idea of a large number of innovative “virtual companies” may be quite a bit in the future.
D.J. Rippert
Congrats to DJ for a well reasoned and articulate rendering of the telecommuting issue to which I am not going to strongly disagree with because some business models and accordingly some CEOs seem to believe that collaboration in person is different than collaboration over wires even though we do have that wonderful app called “Go to Meeting”.
there’s some issues. If you know your business and know the parts of it and are a good judge of character and a good boss – you should be able to tolerate a compromise approach where in-person meetings are mandatory but email collaboration does not require you to be in the adjacent cubical.
but walk into an McDonalds or similar and dollars to donuts, you can tell when the manager is not present…
hi tech folks are not burger flippers for sure but bosses that don’t know how to judge work product feel better if they know the guy is sitting at a desk..
In my mind – a good boss knows how much a work product should take to perform and does pay attention to completed work products in terms of time, quantity and quality.
shops that are run “seat of the pants” tend to be more chaotic.
tele-commuting seems to work better for govt employees for some reason…
but I basically agree with DJ… don’t count on tele-commuting to mitigate transpo needs.
On the other hand, most urban areas are not going to substantially increase their network capacity. They will get spot improvements and improve operations by reducing bottlenecks and the will manage rush hour with variable tolls but they won’t be building mega new capacity…
and that, in turn, goes back to workers. If a boss insists that a worker fight traffic every day to sit in a cubical doing something he could do at home… that guy is liable to be going to be looking around for something closer or more “flexible”.
Many employers these days are using telecommuting to save space costs AND to have independent contractor employees who don’t get benefits and don’t need FICA deducted.
You’d think, in fact, that many high tech jobs have the designers and architects and then the constituent parts could be identified and sectioned into finite and quantifiable tasks that could be essentially put out for bid by individual contractors rather than having to buy expensive office space for a cubical, pay benefits and FICA taxes.
“knowledge-based” “manufacturing” where the work product is basically electronic bits – would seem to be a natural for off-site fabrication and development.
DJ is not only a businessman but a businessman playing in the high tech world.
I’d be curious to hear more from him – perhaps for his own business, HIS pros and cons for his own people telecommuting – or not.
this is really about a whole lot more than transportation – it cuts across several major modern-world issues.
The only solution is a combination of telecommuting and in person work — depending upon the job.
Have been on my own now for 10 years for better or worse and must say that I like the gear in my home office better than in someone’s newsroom, although I often miss the social interaction.
Problem with onsite work is that you waste so much time in meetings and in office. I headed the Moscow news office of a big, New York based company for six years. We were eight hours a head. So, we’d go to work as normal people and work a full eight or nine hour day and on occasion we were fairly productive. Then the New York bosses would stumble into work, coffee in hand. Then we’d have to spend the next few hours answering their questions and seeing who’s on first. Sometimes it was essential if it involved true editorial work, coordination etc. But too many times I’d have to sit listening to what the Washington bureau KNEW was happening because they had just talk to the think tank on Mass Ave when I had been talking that day with the real deal in the Kremlin or elsewhere. Other editors would not believe what we said until it as in the New York Times. Then when it was, “why did you miss this” after having sent telex or emails galore for weeks.
Ugh!
There is a place for telecommuting but the practice must be balanced against the difficulty of managing people whom you can’t see at home (are they working or playing crossword puzzles?) and the advantages of face-to-face collaboration.
What may have more potential is the idea of the “mobile workforce.” The idea isn’t that people should work at home all the time, but that they should be equipped to work at home, on the road, in the office of a partner or client — or at the corporate office — as appropriate. When working on the road, they are engaging in collaboration, just not at the office. These people are not sitting at home.
The real benefit of the mobile-computing technology will be seen when real estate managers recognize that their office buildings are only 50% occupied on average at any give time. The economies will come when companies abandon the idea of one desk or room per worker and shift to a hoteling arrangement. The expense reduction will come from diminished need for office space, not less time spent driving.
I’ll hazard a guess as to what happened at Yahoo! (and it’s only a guess). My bet is that telecommuting started as a good idea. It may have been a way to let people who travel most of the week work from home on Friday. It may have been a way for people to spend a day a week going to their local doctor or dentist or parent / teacher meeting. Then, things started to slip. Some people decided that they never had to go to the office. Some people got married and worked from home in order to be full time caregivers and full time employees. Some people decided that they liked the lifestyle in Idaho more than California and moved there while always working from home. Somebody “knew a guy” in Portland or Falls Church who is “a great guy” and he was hired as a full time virtual worker.
By the time Marissa got in place there was chaos. Meertings couldn’t be scheduled because of time zone differences. Video conference quality depended on the endpoint telecommunications quality of people’s scattered homes. People had people working for them who they had never met in person.
She may also have a problem with too many people on the payroll. Why not kill two birds with one stone? End the telecommuting abuses and cut heads. The highly motivated people who want to keep working at Yahoo! will find a way to get into the office. Others will fade away.
One thing I will say is that Marissa has done a good job of re-orienting Yahoo! It’s early days but she seems to be on the right track.
As for “work from home” being a major answer to congestion – I doubt it. At least not for a while. It has its place and it provides some benefits.
Bacon’s point about unused real estate is a good one. During the many years I worked at Accenture we implemented a “just in time” office process. You walked up to a kiosk every morning and typed in your personnel number. The syatem assigned you and office and switched all of your calls to that office. It also updated the electronic directory to let others know where you were that day. This was done becuse many people traveled almost all the time. There were many cases where whole rows of dedicated offices sat dark and unused for days at a time. People hemmed and hawed at first but then they got over it and moved on.
This is very provocative conversation, above and below.
I think The Don hits a number of high points. At bottom I suspect that highly creative organizations are built upon the deep nature of our being. And so depend in key part upon the personal face to face interaction of key people gathered in a recognized place of ritual and iconic surroundings.
Geo. Washington recognized this need when he founded Washington city. Obama continues this need, demanding that key people from Senators to cabinet heads to Military Chiefs of Staff come to the Temple to Pray every so often to reassert control – at the WHITE HOUSE.
Its as recent as Steve Jobs, through Charlemagne to Caesar going back to the Pharaohs. Great leaders are control freaks. So they demand extreme high quality time at the Temple before the Grandest of all Control Freaks.
Of course the key to real success are those Great Leaders who find ways to fuel creativity and hyper productivity while they exercise the necessary adhesiveness that keeps all pointed in the direction the leader demands to realize his or her overarching vision. This is a complicated and somewhat intuitive process. A mobile distant communication is part of the mix, has been since long before Anthony followed Caesar went to Egypt, things got off the rails. So its a delicate nuanced mix. Likely in part its about keeping the highly competitive ambitious apostles in harness, working against each other to please and gain advantage vis a vis one another while also pulling the cart toward the goal of the Puppet Master Overlord. Such as the one in the red dress sitting atop the big red ball atop The Don’s provocative post.
Correction that unscrambles two improperly scrambled eggs:
“Mobile distant communication is part of the mix. This has been true since long before Anthony followed Caesar to Egypt, and things got off the rails.”
If ANYBODY in the office looked and dressed like that, let alone my boss, I’d show up every day….
I’ve been working at home the past seven years and while I can honestly say I’ve worked many a computer puzzle and surfed for miles, the work got done. It is about the output, not the hours. Put me on a real time clock and…work…expands….to….fit….the….time…..required. I don’t do any more on the days when I am in the office. In fact, because I see those folks so seldom, much of those days is spent socializing and gathering gossip — catching up.
Those photgraphs of Marissa in her 20s don’t do her justice. If you met her on the street and she told you she was a model or an actress you would not have had any reason to doubt her. Sadly, in the still somewhat sexist world of software development people did doubt that she was an engineer at Google.
Seems to have worked out for her in the long run.
As someone that comes into the office every day, I’ll second that. I don’t think I’d take a sick or personal day if she was my boss.
Looks like I found myself a sugar mama. Now to get her number…
Hokie:
You could ask her husband or her new child’s nanny. I am sure they both have Marissa’s number.
You’re a few years too late, I am afraid.
re: ” and…work…expands….to….fit….the….time”
that’s the dirty little secret of people who really know how to do their job that the boss is woefully ignorant of
and some bosses know this and that’s why they want you where they can watch you!
I’d also be curious to see a comparison of telecommuting rates in various urban areas.
my impression is that there is a lot more of it going on in the DC area and in urban areas with large concentrations of govt workers.
so perhaps a comparison of urban areas broken down into private sector and govt workers.