No More Work from Home
Acccording to TeleworkResearchNetwork.com, by 2016 4.9 million workers will telecommute on a regular basis.
But don’t look now, first Yahoo and now Best Buy have pulled back on ambitious programs that allowed employees to work from home. Is this a step backwards?
…announced in a company memo last week by Yahoo’s human resources director, lays bare a little-discussed truth in many companies: Working remotely has some serious downsides. They range from less-trusting teams, a greater likelihood of communication gaps and, for workers, a blurred boundary between home and work.
Noting that some of the best insights arise from incidental encounters in the hall or around the coffee machine, the memo added that “speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.”
Several hundred Yahoo employees work at home full time, with many more telecommuting a few days a week, AllThingsD reported. Yahoo is hardly the first firm to clamp down on remote working–late last year Bank of America was said to have restricted its flexible-work program by asking staff to come into the office more often, a move that it said would help boost collaboration.
—At Yahoo, Working from Home Doesn’t Work | 2/23/2013 | by Rachel Emma Silverman for Wall Street Journal
Best Buy, seen as a trailblazer for its progressive telecommuting policy, is now putting limits on the ability of its non-store staff to work from home.
Just a week after Yahoo told its workers that they could no longer work from home, Best Buy ended its Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) program, which allowed employees to set their own hours and work from anywhere as long as they got the job done. Telecommuting is not completely ruled out as an option for the company’s 4,000 non-store employees, but workers will need to seek managerial approval first.
The change comes as Best Buy has been trying to cut costs while dealing with sluggish sales. Company executives decided the telecommuting policy was out of step with the challenges it faces.
—Best Buy ends trailblazing work-at-home program | 3/5/13 | by Jay Greene for Cnet
For more information on this topic – check out PC Pitstop’s Running a Virtual Company blog.
Infographic courtesy Wrike.com/Tony Keller
