If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
A multitude of studies show that traditional bricks and mortar offices are among the very worst places to get work done.
Mayer was brought in to turn around Yahoo!'s fortunes. She was not hired to talk about the difficulties of having a young child and still working at the office. (Quick question -- do you know if Larry Page or Sergei Brin have children?)
National Telework Week came to an end on March 8 but this important conversation about workplace flexibility must continue.
As my teenage son has told me, he too is relying on telecommuting to realize his current goal in life. He gets lonely in his home office, aka his smelly sock-strewn bedroom as well.
For more than a decade now, I've struggled to define what fuels the most sustainably productive work environment. Perhaps nothing I've uncovered is as important as trust.
Then snowstorms hit the Midwest and East Coast, closing schools and businesses, and people turned to -- you guessed it -- telecommuting to stay productive and safe. When the snow melts, will the backlash against teleworking continue?
Decades of social science research provide more than sufficient practical and empirical evidence that optimizing the degree of control workers have over the conditions of their work results in measurable benefits for all organizational stakeholders: the workers themselves.
The reason, I suspect, has less to do with a particular arrangement than with the issue of trust. In return for companies treating workers like adults, employees tend to perform better as a sign of good faith.
Unemployment numbers are dropping. I am still skeptical, because the numbers do lie, and are always adjusted. In the meantime for the 12 million sti...
I'm proud to be a woman and nobody's ever accused me of being too accommodating, but there's a few conversations around women that have been amusing me lately.
The debate about how we accommodate mothers in the workplace should be much larger than any one CEO. When we have no national child care policy, and no consistent national standard about how new mothers are treated at work, we all suffer.
Everyone is pissed off about Yahoo's new ban on working from home. Or at least, that's what the media coverage seems to suggest. But none of these news articles have asked a basic question: What does the research show?
Do you remember when female leaders at the top of Silicon Valley companies were hard to find? Well, they still are. But at least now, there are a few more than there were. Only 14 years ago Carly Fiorina was the first.
Here's the thing -- it's not about working from home vs. in the office. That's too simplistic. Working from home is not a one size fits all panacea, but neither is Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's directive to eliminate them all.
Which trade-offs are acceptable and which are losing propositions? Inevitably, if a company begins to see employee satisfaction, engagement and loyalty as a trade-off, it is not headed in the right direction.
The situation surrounding Marissa's decision is forcing us to think about success in a highly competitive environment and the scrutiny that comes with being the youngest female to take the helm of a troubled but venerated brand with a baby in tow.
