Work at Home’s Interesting and Uncertain Future: Are Yahoo and Best Buy, Making a Difference?

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Work at Home’s Interesting and Uncertain Future: Are Yahoo and Best Buy, Making a Difference?

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost

And what was the difference it made?

Two major management; no leadership decisions have registered on the Richter scale in the last few weeks.

Marissa Mayer, the new CEO at Yahoo decreed that all work at home employees must return to the office and interact with each other. Hubert Joly, CEO of Best Buy put an end to the Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) whereby employees could work whenever and wherever they wanted to as long as the work got done.

Oh the humanity! Imagine the indignity of actually having to work around other people and adhere to a schedule that isn’t your own.

Of course it isn’t that simple. Snarky sarcasm aside, these directives are a major upset for people who have become accustomed to a schedule that, if not flexible, at least is more conducive to their own personal needs. Most often cited is the stay at home mom. That’s an especially poignant argument when one considers that Mayer installed a nursery near her office for her own newborn; a luxury that those she’s called back to the office can’t afford.

I try to be slow to jump on the critique bandwagon as it’s always embarrassing when your original comments turn out to be wrong when new evidence emerges. But, I also like to start early in evaluating these kinds of leadership tsunamis in order to learn the lessons that appear along the way.

At Yahoo, Mayer decided that working at home did not benefit the company as much as if those employees could interact face-to-face. She might have something there. I run my business from my home office. The best part of the arrangement is that I’m at home. The worst part is that I’m at home. Sure, there are plenty of distractions at the office, but there are just as many at home and it seems much easier to succumb to them.

At Best Buy, the ROWE concept has been much heralded by researchers as the future of employee work-life balance. It seemed like a good concept, and I believe has some merit. The concept has been exported to many other companies, often by Best Buy themselves. The ROWE concept requires a more involved management and leadership structure as it’s harder to pull things together when everyone is working at their own pace and on their own schedule.

So, it would seem these two icons of employee autonomy have suddenly executed an about-face. Is that good or bad? Only time will tell. Unfortunately, time is not a plentiful commodity when trying to save a company. It’s interesting to note that stock prices have increased recently for both companies, though that may be more of a sort of ticker tape Hawthorne effect.

Of course, often masked by anonymity, the usual assortment of comments have appeared all over the web varying questions of Mayer’s and Joly’s parental heritage to accolades for finally getting a handle on this out of control trend. What I find most interesting is that many of the comments indicate a spreading belief that such things as flexible work hours and companies bending over backwards to accommodate employee demands for “work-life” balance are the minimum that workers should expect. I’m a big believer in accommodating workers as much as possible but it appears that many have forgotten that the company does not exist to employ workers but that employees work for the company. Employee success is directly tied to company success. But it’s a trend that leaders cannot ignore.

Mayer and Joly have taken bold action. Now, while they suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous blogger comments, I’ll be watching to see if their bold action is successful. I believe the message that will send goes much deeper than just those two companies.

What will be the difference they make?