When I was at Yahoo in 2008, some staff were always "working from home" but never responded to IM or email. They'd surface for a day or two, squeeze out an artefact, then vanish again for a week.
I somewhat blame their direct managers. It's always tempting for lower-level employees to game the system, especially if they are having personal issues (young kids, bad marriage, low workplace morale). Managers should provide guidance to bring their reports back into line.
Then again, the managers in question were busy fighting org politics and seemed happy just to have an extra "soldier" on their roster.
So maybe Marissa's stalinist purge of remote workers will prove to be a blunt but effective instrument for flushing out the bludgers.
That's what confused me. I'm wary of armchair-CEOing, given that I have no experience at that level whatsoever. However, it seems like there would be an easier solution to "people who WFH and don't do anything": deal with people who _don't do anything_ (whether at home or in the office). Try as I might, I can't see the benefit to this blunter approach that would justify the cost to recruitment and legitimate remote workers.
Yahoo is a big company. It's not like a startup or even an small enterprise, where everyone knows Johnny is on facebook all day and Terry takes a 3 hour liquid lunch. There's too many places to hide in a big org.
So to identify unproductive people using a top-down approach, you'd need a metric to measure staff productivity and force the managers to implement it.
Which do you think would be less popular, a) curtailing remote work or b) implementing and enforcing an org-wide productivity metric?
I somewhat blame their direct managers. It's always tempting for lower-level employees to game the system, especially if they are having personal issues (young kids, bad marriage, low workplace morale). Managers should provide guidance to bring their reports back into line.
Then again, the managers in question were busy fighting org politics and seemed happy just to have an extra "soldier" on their roster.
So maybe Marissa's stalinist purge of remote workers will prove to be a blunt but effective instrument for flushing out the bludgers.