Yahoo's Work From Home Policy

My first reaction when I saw the news item on Yahoo's work from home policy was that I had misread the article. More and more organizations are moving towards flexible work arrangements and it is certainly a surprise to see a SF Bay area organization like Yahoo issue a blanket policy. I have been following the comments and reactions in the news and the social media and this certainly is causing some waves.

What surprises me  most is the policy being applied to all of Yahoo - I presume no general exceptions. I admit I have had similar challenges in a recent role where I inherited an organization with a significant percentage of employees were remote/home based employees. In addition, the organization allowed flexible working arrangements including working part of the week from home, summer hours and more. This worked extremely well with those employees that had been with the company for a few years, had good domain knowledge, worked on mature applications and were more of what we called "individual contributors". However, the same cannot be said of new product development efforts that used Agile methodology, required a great deal of collaboration day in and day out, impromptu meetings etc. Travel budgets being what they are, there were very few opportunities to get the teams together. This caused a rethink of the policy of hiring new home based/remote employees on those efforts that required collaboration.

However, we continued to have the flexibility letting employees work from home on 1-2 days a week as well as allowing remote work arrangements where possible. I would rather have valued employees work from home than risk losing them completely. Good employees are not easy to find and the time and investment needed to bring new employees up to speed is simply not worth it. Only time will tell how this move turns out for Yahoo.

I imagine, Yahoo like,  most companies has employees, partners and customers all around the world. It was common, although never the expectation, for my employees to be on calls and respond to emails early in the morning and late at night. I have been on calls in the middle of night, sometimes with over 100 employees on the call, trying resolve a major outage. How does Yahoo expect to deal with these issues? If I am forced to be in the office everyday, maybe I should just leave my laptop locked up in my desk and my smartphone turned off. Maybe that might not be so bad after all!