When asked how many Google employees
telecommute, Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette replied, "As few as
possible." "There is something magical about spending the time
together, about noodling on ideas, about asking at the computer, 'What do you
think of this?' " Reflecting Google and Apple’s philosophy, Yahoo's human
resourcies chief wrote in a memo, "We need to be working
side-by-side," citing the importance of decisions and insights that can
arise from impromptu meetings and that "speed and quality are often
sacrificed when we work from home."
Mayer’s supporters defend her decision
by pointing out that many Yahoo workers who work at home never came in and hid
from management, and that her decree is a wake-up call to get focused on
teamwork and innovation so that the company can get up to speed.
CEO Mayer, a former Google executive,
had already taken steps to improve work conditions at Yahoo, giving employees
new smart phones and providing free meals, among other amenities, but critics
say that Yahoo’s new policy seems oppressive. "The question is whether
this move will result in an exodus among the company's top talent," said
John Challenger, CEO of the outplacement firm Challenger Gray& Christmas,
noting that "many Silicon Valley tech firms are battling each other to
attract and retain the best talent."
While this might be a viable argument,
one cannot help but wonder if the many currently unemployed would make the
sacrifice of commuting to work for a regular paycheck. We are not talking about
oppressive working conditions; no one would want to work for such a company. We
are talking about commuting to work, and working for a company that also
supplies free food. But perhaps I digress.
Stanford economics professor Nicholas
Bloom spoke of a study of a Chinese online travel firm, CTrip, which found
call-center employees were more productive and performed at a higher level when
allowed to work from home. However, a distinction was drawn between call-center
workers and higher-skilled professionals, such as executives or software
developers. He said the latter can benefit from the flexibility of working at
home but also from collaboration in the office. "It's typical for high-end
employees to work from home one or two days a week," he said. "They
get time away to think and time to be creative and to have a work-life balance.
But it's not helpful to have them permanently absent from the workplace."
I think we need to be clear about two
points: (1) we are not discussing call-center employees. The work of the
call-center employee is closely monitored by log-in procedures, phone records,
key strokes, etc. When they are working, there is nothing nebulous about it.
(2) we also are not talking about the telecommuting contractor.
For the most part, telecommuting sounds
appealing, but telecommuting can mean that you wind up working more hours per
week than you would if you did not spend time working from home. “The ability
to telecommute simply lengthens your work week,” says Jennifer L. Glass, of the
University of Texas, who wrote a study with Mary C. Noonan of the University of
Iowa, which was published in the Monthly Labor Review. “The promise of
telecommuting was that it would help us work when we want where we want.”
Instead“it’s really a story of managers being able to squeeze more work out of
us,”she says. Telecommuting doesn’t substitute for time spent in the office.
“We still have a face-time culture where managers expect us to be in the office
for a certain amount of time,” she notes.
Environmental pundits say that Yahoo is also
setting itself up as a company that is not “green.” As of June 2011, there were
roughly 2.9 million telecommuters in the UnitedStates, according to the
Telework Research Network (TRN), a telecommuting consulting and research firm
group. Per TRN, stay-at-home workers save an annual 390 million gallons of gas
and prevent the release of 3.6 million tons of greenhouse gases. Regular
telecommuters will total 4.9 million by 2016, TRN finds, a 69 percent increase
from the current level. If all 50 million US employees who TRN deem
"telework-compatible" were to work from home 2.4 days a week, the
savings would total over $900 billion a year. That's enough to reduce our
Persian Gulfoil imports by 46 percent, the firm says.
A current popular belief is that
employees commit to an organization because they buy into company goals and
feel valued, not because they are ordered to sit at their desks. I don’t know;
I think a good salary and good benefits go a long way too. Some people maintain
that Yahoo may have long-term trust and morale issues if it continues this
policy, and it may result in exodus, as talents leave for employers who do not
see work-life flexibility at war with job performance. I don’t think that Yahoo
has to worry about this; as the unhappy talent leaves, happy talent, talent
happy to have good jobs, will take their place.
Workers who
have control over where, when and how they work are thought of as less productive; giving
workers flexibility to integrate personal life with work is viewed as
antithetical to boosting performance, especially when that integrating of
personal life occurs during “regular” work hours. However, studies have shown
that all workers value control over personal and work time. The argument for it
is that having flextime and telework can make a huge difference in people's
lives as they juggle work and life.
Then there is the argument that
telecommuting flexibility enables an employee to work at his or her optimum
time and/or hours. This might be true, but if your optimum working hours are
from 10:00pm to 6:00am, how do you participate in meetings and collaborate? How
far should flexibility be taken before other employees and the work product
suffer? The experts say that companies need to set clear performance goals and
regular times for meetings and calls, and, when management is no longer sure
who works for them or how to coordinate a team, and employees always place
their own interests over the company, that’s when it is time to draw in the
telecommuters. Is this not just what Mayer is doing?
Now let us discuss an aspect that no
one seems to want to address or even think about: The Legalities. The February
2013 issue of the Labor Letter did just that in addressing legal concerns that
telecommuting raises.
Even if an employee works from home, the
company is responsible for compliance with state and federal wage-hour laws,
including paying non-exempt employees overtime for all time worked in excess of
forty hours in a work week. If an employee takes calls after hours or even when
on vacation, or if the employee answers emails late at night or during the
weekend, that time could count as compensable work time.
More legalities: employers are
responsible for providing a safe workplace to all employees, even employees
working at home, under the Occupational Safety and Health Act.
Workers’compensation laws still apply to telecommuters, even when working at
home. (I wonder how many employers know that!) To address these issues,
telecommuters could be required to have a designated workspace that has been
inspected and approved by the company to address workplace safety obligations.
The designated workspace can even be subject to random safety inspections and
it can be required that the telecommuter maintain safe work practices.
Remember, this is in the home.
Employers are obligated to protect
employees from discrimination and harassment, whether they work at home or in
the office, and any telecommuting policy must be implemented in a
nondiscriminatory manner. In other words, if you let one employee telecommute
and not another, you better have a good reason, a good delineation, why one can
and another cannot.
With the complicated and potential
legalities involved, if companies fully understand and appreciate them, you
wonder, why they would want employees telecommuting.
The most telling problem with
telecommuting as a work-life solution, according to the study published in the
Labor Review mentioned above, is its strong relationship to long work hours and
the “work devotion schema.” The majority of wired workers report telecommuting
technology has increased their overall work hours and that workers use
technology to perform work tasks even when sick or on vacation. I think that
the key phrase to this aspect of the study is “. . .wired workers report . . .“
Did they really think the telecommuter would report that they were underworked?
That’s pretty naive.
I think that there can be a good future
for telecommuting but only when the issues are resolved, especially the issues
of time accountability and the issues of participation in the collaborative
and/or creative processes. We have all worked with employees who were supposed
to be knee-deep in a project who actually were at the movies, the golf course,
the beauty salon, or Nordstrom. I have also worked with the telecommuter who is
“too swamped” to finish and/or present a project, or who suddenly experiences
software issues, and so the load falls on the shoulders of the on-site
employee. I have heard the telecommuting employee complain on a speaker phone
“I need a little cooperation here” when an on-site employee really was too busy
to finish the work for him. To be fair, I have also seen telecommuting at its
best, when the telecommuter seemingly has worked magic with his results.
However, unfortunately, that was more uncommon.
As unpopular as Mayer’s decision might
be in certain circles, it has in fact given air to the need to zero in on
telecommuting policies and procedures to insure that ALL employees, whether
on-site or telecommuting, are fulfilling their commitments to the company that
issues their paychecks.
Until next time, LL&P!
