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| Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has left hundreds of staff facing the tough choice of relocating from home to Yahoo's nearest office by June - or quitting. Photograph: Peter Kramer/AP |
Marissa Mayer has ordered an end to 'remote' work as all staff are told
to be in the office as part of a new era of collaboration
Surfing the web from at home might be just what Yahoo's chief Marissa Mayer
wants her audience to do – but she has banned employees of the company
itself from working "remotely", in an edict sent out last Friday to
Yahoo's thousands of staff.
Several hundred staff must now
relocate their home offices to Yahoo's nearest office outpost by June –
or quit, as the former Google chief gets serious about getting the
company's staff back into "meat space" so it can be a contender in the
web space.
The memo from human resources chief Jackie Reses – but
driven by Mayer – says that "to become the absolute best place to work,
communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be
working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present
in our offices."
But the mood of Yahoo's 11,500 employees – down
from 14,100 at the end of 2011 – can be guessed from the fact that the
memo is marked: "PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION – DO NOT
FORWARD" and that it has been forwarded to the news site AllThingsD by "a plethora" of staff, according to senior editor Kara Swisher, who broke the story.
The
memo points out that even those who only work one or two days in the
office will have to submit to the new regime. But it seems that what
Mayer has in mind is the provision of more water coolers and coffee
machines: "Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and
cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team
meetings," it says. "Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work
from home."
Mayer was hired in secret
and took over in July 2012, and soon afterwards announced that she
would be having her first child – which was duly born in October. Mayer
however eschewed maternity leave to go straight back to work.
Having
won a number of awards – including being ranked in the "Top 50 Best
Places to Work" by Business Insider in 2013, and "Top 500 Green
Companies" by Newsweek in 2010 – Yahoo may find itself winning another,
for "biggest group of suddenly annoyed professionals". Although the memo
says that "Being a Yahoo isn't just about your day-to-day job", a
number are now wondering if it might be exactly that.
One former
Yahoo worker commenting at AllThingsD said that working from home made
them far more productive than being in the office: "Why? I didn't have
to put up with numbskull self-important programmers constantly yakking
to each other LOUDLY from the next set of cubicles about
non-work-related stuff, and I wasn't being distracted every 20 minutes
by some bored soul coming over to my desk to go for coffee or foosball,
or just to talk about the spreading ennui of knowing we were working for
a company whose glory days were long over."
The UK press office
declined to say whether staff here will be affected: "we do not comment
on internal matters," a spokesman said.
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