“Epic fail.” “Hypocrite.” “Idiotic.” Those were just a few of the criticisms flung at Yahoo’s C.E.O., Marissa Mayer, after news broke that she was banning telecommuting at the company. Since Mayer took over, last summer, she had received glowing reviews, and Yahoo’s stock had risen thirty-five per cent. But critics of the ban think that it will demoralize a shaky company and undo the good work so far. Not to mention the negative effect on pajama sales.
Mayer is certainly bucking a trend. Although telecommuting is still relatively unusual in corporate America, the number of people working regularly from home rose more than sixty per cent between 2005 and 2009, and, at some big companies, like Aetna, almost half the staff telecommutes. The arrangement is supposed to have various benefits. A Stanford study found that Chinese call-center employees who worked from home were thirteen per cent more productive. Another study estimated that a ten-per-cent increase in telecommuting could save a hundred billion dollars in lost time and expenses. But it’s more than that. The idea of telecommuting has always had a strongly utopian flavor. Alvin Toffler argued that it would reintegrate work and family, and bring “a new emphasis on the home as the center of society.” Seen this way, Yahoo isn’t just tweaking an H.R. policy. It’s trampling on the future.
But Yahoo—which has struggled to come up with new ideas and needs a more coherent identity—is making a smart call. Most studies of telecommuting focus on how working from home affects employees. Less often discussed is how telecommuting affects employers. And the research on this suggests that for Yahoo the costs of telecommuting dwarf its benefits.
On the simplest level, telecommuting makes it harder for people to have the kinds of informal interaction that are crucial to the way knowledge moves through an organization. The role that hallway chat plays in driving new ideas has become a cliché of business writing, but that doesn’t make it less true. John Seely Brown, an organizational guru who was the director of the Xerox PARC research center for a decade, told me, “Those chance encounters that become evocative turn out to be incredibly important. They allow people to get out of their ruts and think about things that they might otherwise have missed.” Seely Brown worked on a study of Xerox’s copier repairmen. He found that when the men were just hanging out in the coffee room they weren’t wasting time; rather, they were having highly productive conversations about problems encountered on the job.
It’s possible to have conversations like this online. But in most organizations they don’t happen. A firm called Sociometric Solutions, the brainchild of some M.I.T. students and their professor, has developed a digital tagging system to measure workforce interactions. Ben Waber, the C.E.O., told me, “Digital communication tends to be very good for planned interactions, like formal meetings. But a lot of the value of working with people comes from all those interactions that you didn’t plan.” Waber worked on a project showing that call centers where the workers had tight-knit, face-to-face networks were twice as productive as those where workers were more disconnected from each other. Just changing the rules so that workers could take coffee breaks at the same time was enough to boost their productivity.
The fundamental point is that much of the value that gets created in a company comes from the ways in which workers teach and learn from each other. If telecommuters do less of that, the organization will be weaker. On top of this, there’s evidence that telecommuting can make it hard to foster trust and solidarity—an issue that matters a lot to Yahoo right now. Face time is still the easiest way to build connections, and non-telecommuters are sometimes jealous of their colleagues at home. One study of virtual teams found that if team members simply met in person before working together they trusted each other more and performed better. And studies show that managers often view telecommuters, accurately or not, as uncommitted.
At a struggling company, these problems can reinforce each other: distrust and lack of focus lead people to disengage, which leads to more distrust, and so on. This may explain why Mayer reportedly found that many full-time telecommuters weren’t logging in to the company’s network enough, and why the company’s offices were virtually empty on Fridays. In a company that has floundered for years, it’s natural for workers to look out only for themselves. In that sense, the ban on telecommuting isn’t just about productivity. “It’s demoralizing to come to the office when no one’s there,” Waber said. “Just changing that is valuable.”
Yahoo’s decision doesn’t—and shouldn’t—signal the end of telecommuting. At companies with healthier corporate cultures, it often works well, and Seely Brown has shown how highly motivated networks of far-flung experts—élite surfers, say—use digital technologies to transmit knowledge much as they would in person. And just putting people in proximity to one another doesn’t guarantee that they’re going to work well together. Still, it’s telling that the companies, like Google, that are shaping the digital world are also the ones that have invested the most in building corporate campuses outfitted with every perk imaginable. Even as they make a remote-access future possible for the rest of us, they’re doing everything they can to preserve an office environment that’s surprisingly old school. ♦
