It seems to me like Yahoo has several years of undesirable cultural legacy. The company needs to reinvent itself. Redefining WFH is a part of that, but the problem is that there are a large number of things that Yahoo needs to do and getting the order right is important. Cracking down on WFH before dealing with the other problems is a bad call.
The real question is: why are there so many unmotivated, unproductive people? Is it bad hiring or bad project management? I don't think there are a large number of intrinsic underperformers, so much as people demotivated by contexts that leave no real opportunities for achievement. Perhaps there are a lot of pointless projects that have no career upside, but that people can't escape from, so they use the bog as an excuse to retire on-the-job. I'm not saying that that's right-- it's not-- but, if this is the case, then it's important to deal with the underlying problem instead of the symptom only.
One of the things that executives get wrong on this is that, if you want to preserve morale, you've got to put a "shit sandwich" (good-bad-good pattern) around your crackdown. First, you do something related and good for the employees (like give them more opportunities to pick what they work on). Then, you deliver the crackdown (reduced WFH). Finally, once you've achieved what you're looking for, you scale the crackdown back or add a perk that makes it more acceptable.
There are two big questions that yahoo faces. What the fuck do they want to be as a company? And what do they intend to do with the engineers they have right now?
They haven't come up with an answer to the first question so far as I can tell, which is a bigger problem than anything else.
For the second question they are faced with a lot of problems. If they want to try to retain as much talent as possible they're going about it the wrong way. If they want to instill discipline and transition down to a smaller more mediocre more "enterprisey" company that pumps out crappy line-of-business apps then they're doing a damned fine job so far.
If I were forced to try to turn yahoo around I'd start by identifying the major projects that yahoo should execute on and then I'd either fire almost everyone and start from scratch or I'd work by replacing the company from the inside out by growing a "bubble" that was a new division built with new rules with new management that hired both from outside the company and from within yahoo and was highly results oriented and, at least initially, worked on fast iteration projects that are easier to judge success on.
A couple good candidates for projects that could serve to help re-energize the company are flickr, yahoo stores, and yahoo hosting services. Revolutionize those, iteratively, make them competitive, and you could go a long way toward revitilizing the company and providing projects that people actually want to work on.
I think you are right on this point: they need to figure out the strategy and direction of the company, and then blast it out everywhere (isn't this the CEO's job)? Define the vision, communicate it, then arrange your resources to aggressively pursue it.
I agree that it will be interesting to find out if Yahoo is sitting on a pile of talented engineers who just need better management in order to return to productivity, or if years of bad management have caused all the real talent to flee. My hunch (based on working at a poorly managed big company) is it's the latter and that years of bad management have created a sort of adverse selection in engineering talent. Talented productive people will leave or be poached away and the people you're left with will happily sit around doing nothing and taking a pay check. My prediction is that Yahoo is going to fire a bunch of people this year.
I'd guess that Yahoo has some talented people and some deadweight, but that seems obvious. No idea what the proportions are.
How would you fix the problem?
Abstractly, I support the idea of firing the untalented, lazy, or parasitic people who drain the company. In practice, very few companies can execute this, because figuring out who those people are, without the process getting corrupted and political, is a rarely accomplished feat. Project-by-project layoffs, while more unfair, I think are often better than most "low performer initiatives" that devolve into witch hunts.
Certainly, if she implements Google's HR/performance review process, she'll only make the company worse and probably kill it.
The overall impression seems to be that "The Elves Left Middle Earth" several years ago, and Yahoo today is primarily C-players. Different people will have different opinions, this is simply the result of my gathered impressions.
Now, Marissa Mayer is heavily involved with new hiring at Yahoo[1]. While this isn't a silver bullet, it probably raises their hiring process from ~10th percentile to ~30th percentile (numbers not exact.)
Combine those two and that means that the average new hire is better than the average old employee. So randomly firing old employees and hiring new ones is actually a +EV bet.
This is an incredibly rare situation! But when you consider the sheer insanity of the circumstances Mayer is working against, I actually believe that most of her decisions have been correct.
I think a successful strategy could look something like this: First, fire a bunch of people to free up some money. Next, hire some upper level management from Google (or Facebook, Apple, wherever) and give them the authority to build new organizations within Yahoo using either existing Yahoo employees or by hiring people away from other companies in the valley. Sell the opportunity to work at "the new yahoo" under manager X (who was recently hired and presumably has some name recognition) that is insulated from "the old yahoo" and all its crappy culture of politics and underachievement.
The real question is: why are there so many unmotivated, unproductive people? Is it bad hiring or bad project management? I don't think there are a large number of intrinsic underperformers, so much as people demotivated by contexts that leave no real opportunities for achievement. Perhaps there are a lot of pointless projects that have no career upside, but that people can't escape from, so they use the bog as an excuse to retire on-the-job. I'm not saying that that's right-- it's not-- but, if this is the case, then it's important to deal with the underlying problem instead of the symptom only.
One of the things that executives get wrong on this is that, if you want to preserve morale, you've got to put a "shit sandwich" (good-bad-good pattern) around your crackdown. First, you do something related and good for the employees (like give them more opportunities to pick what they work on). Then, you deliver the crackdown (reduced WFH). Finally, once you've achieved what you're looking for, you scale the crackdown back or add a perk that makes it more acceptable.