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On
Feb. 22 a leaked memo sent from Jacqueline Reses,Yahoo!’s (YHOO) executive vice president of people and
development (that’s code for HR), announced that Yahoo employees would no
longer be able to work from home. Even on the days that employees had family
obligations or had to “stay home for the cable guy,” Reses urged them to “use
your best judgment.” Yahoo is bucking the national trend: According to the Telework
Research Network, an independent employment research firm, the number of people
who work remotely rose 73 percent from 2005 to 2011. Today, 20 million to 30
million Americans work from home at least once a week.
Yet
Yahoo isn’t the only company forcing its remote workers into the office. In
December, Bank of America (BAC) scaled back My Work, its
work-from-home program that began in 2005—and by 2010 included more than 15,000
employees. To cut costs and improve efficiency, each bank department now
assesses telecommuting on an individual basis. Both Twitter andGoogle (GOOG)—where Yahoo Chief
Executive Officer Marissa Mayer was employee No. 20—encourage staffers to work
at the office because it generates a more collaborative atmosphere. While
Google has no official policy, Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette said
last week, “Working from the office is really important.” So how many people
telecommute at Google? “As few as possible,” he said.
For a Google exec, Pichette seems
uncharacteristically out of touch with the data. Several academic studies
report major productivity gains when employees are given the freedom to work
where and when they like. A February study from Stanford University
found that when employees of a Chinese travel agency were allowed to work from
home, they were 13 percent more productive than when they worked in the
building, ultimately saving the company $2,000 per person per year. “Is it
easier to have everyone in the same place? Yeah, of course it is. But that
doesn’t mean it’s always better,” says Brett Caine, senior vice president and
general manager of Citrix Online, a mobile networking company.
“Telecommuting … has allowed me to have a
career as well as be a mother,” wrote an irate “digital mom” on Babble after
the Yahoo announcement. But it’s just as popular among childless employees as
parents. And mothers are no more likely to work from home than fathers,
according to Telework. “It’s kind of a shame that it gets made into a mommy
thing, because it’s families in general who need this flexibility,” says Kate
Lister, Telework’s president.
Face
time is still critical to one’s career. According to researchers Kimberly
Elsbach and Daniel Cable, people who show up to the office are more likely to
be promoted or receive better performance reviews than their remote co-workers.
“Just being seen at work, without any information about what you’re actually
doing, leads people to think more highly of you,” they wrote in the summer 2012
issue of MIT Sloan Management Review. And those at-home workers
in the Stanford study? Although they were more productive, their rate of
performance-based promotions declined by half.
Yet surveys repeatedly show that 80 percent
to 86 percent of employees want the opportunity to work from home. The more
flexibility workers have, the higher their job satisfaction and the less likely
they are to leave a company. And they do work harder. A 2010 Brigham Young
University study found
that office employees work only 38 hours a week before they feel as if they’re
neglecting their home lives, while people who work from home may clock 57 hours
before feeling they’re stretched too thin. That’s because they tailor their
schedules to their needs, rather than try to cram every errand, doctor’s
appointment, and homework session into the precious few hours when they’re not
at the office.
Sign up before Midnight to watch our video,
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