Why Won’t Yahoo! Let Employees Work From Home? – Businessweek
Why Won’t Yahoo! Let Employees Work From Home? – Businessweek:
Oh boy, Mayer is gonna cause a lot of shake up here with her everyone-has-to-travel-to-work policy.
Apparently (Today Show) she now as a nursery set up next door to her office for her new convenience. That helps new parents, maybe, but not the ones with kids in school or those people who live a longer way from the office.
But Mayer is shaking it up.
There has long been the debate about the down side of work-at-home (WAH). And a tech leader like Yahoo might just be a place to face-to-face interaction that is lost from WAH.
But, I fear that making everyone drive to work is a major setback to telecommuting efforts that are so very beneficial to the efforts of sustainability.
Studies show that the true costs of telecommuting are far closer to $40,000 per year than to the $5,000 cost of gas. Most of that savings goes to the employer. Closer to $45,000 if you want to include the less-tangible costs of externalities such as infrastructure and greenhouse gases (GHGs).
This action by the Yahoo is yet another demonstration of how difficult it is to maintain the benefits and limits of a program through the course of the years and the biases of people that affect the program. For example, remote work/telecommuting/WAH was never to be a replacement for child care. In fact, in many companies years ago the employee ahd to sign a contract stipulating among other things, that WAH would not involve child care. Second, remote work was designed to be one, two days a week per employee, max. At some point, it became the entire week for many. Third, you cannot find a study that states that WAH decreases productivity. Among the things toy will find is that most WAH-ers actually work through the time they would be spending commuting- employers gains with that. The gold standard for telework research is http://www.Teleworkresearchnetwork.com see Kate Lister and Tom Harnish. Employers gain bigtime. Fourth, remote work if scaled, can result in not sending millions of metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every work day. This is orders of magnitude better than electric cars, ethanols, new public transportation. This is a win, win, win-employer, employee, environment. But, very hard to get it going. For more info, go to http://www.TMSwriters.com and click on "Sustainability" (be patient, plz) You'll get to "Comin' Down in Three Part Harmony."
You can make $20 for a 20 minute survey!
Guess what? This is exactly what big companies are paying for. They need to know what their average customer needs and wants. So large companies pay $1,000,000's of dollars per month to the average person. In return, the average person, like me and you, fills out surveys and gives them their opinion.