Is Work from Home Failing in India? Lessons from Yahoo's Policy Change

Dear All,

The State of Work from Home and Flexi-Time in India

Working from home and flexi-time were buzzwords until last year. IT companies tried to introduce this in India, but it seems that it is not going well. Recently, Yahoo has retracted its policy on this. Please read What does Yahoo's work from home ban mean for Indian cos - Economic Times.

I personally think that for such concepts, the individual needs to be very professional. In India, there is a tendency to deviate from the company goal if such options are given. There are cases where people abuse the policies. Again, what works well in Europe and the US will not always work in India.

Good insight.

Regards,

Yahoo Employees Misusing Benefits

The employees at Yahoo were misusing the benefit to put in minimum work while working on their startup on the side. So, in a way, Yahoo was supporting their startup but getting almost nothing. Marissa Mayer did the right thing to ban such a benefit.

The news is a little old. Ms. Marissa Mayer, CEO of the company, made this decision last week itself. In the USA, there was a lot of outrage over this decision.

You wrote, "Working from home and flexi-time were buzzwords until last year. IT companies tried to introduce this in India, but it seems that it is not going well."

Who knows whether it is going well or not? There is no comparative study to show that productivity has declined by working from home.

For a certain section of the industry, "work from home" suits well. This is not only because of the nature of the work, but employees were happy because instead of spending time in traffic, they could spend time either at home or on office work. Secondly, real estate prices are skyrocketing in India. Against this backdrop, "work from home" was a boon to some companies. It has become a major cost-cutting tool. In fact, a company no less than Mphasis had once declared that their real estate utilization rate was 1:1.2. They wanted to raise it to 1:1.33.

In most IT companies today, anything from 10% to 30% of employees are working from home.

Yahoo's Decision and Its Implications

Regarding Yahoo's decision, I have been tracking this company for the last 2-3 years. First and foremost, this company lost the race with Google long ago. The second race it lost was when the company's board did not allow a takeover from Google or Microsoft. Both companies were ready to offer a share price of US$ 30-35. The Yahoo board declined. Within a year, the stock fell to US$ 10.

The second issue with Yahoo was frequent changes in their CEOs. In the last four years, we have seen as many CEOs.

The next issue with this company is a lack of strategic foresight. The kind of diversification that Google did, Yahoo could have also done. But they did not. By sticking to the same business, they are paying the price of getting sidelined.

Ms. Marissa Mayer has come from Google, the only company she served for years. She knew well that Google does not mind whether employees work from the office or from home. Now, her decision is groundbreaking, but how successful it will be in making Yahoo innovative remains to be seen. Today, the challenges in front of her are diversification and innovation. By making people work from the office, will she be able to bring these two factors to Yahoo? As of now, there is resentment among Yahoos for being told to work from the office. Hopefully, this tide of resentment recedes soon; otherwise, it may become counterproductive.

The Professionalism Required for Remote Work

Lastly, you wrote, "I personally think that for such concepts, the individual needs to be very professional." Yes, all the companies that do this, like Yahoo, IBM, Google, etc., are quite professional, no doubt. What Ms. Mayer has done was for the entire globe and not just for India, and it would be unfair to single out India.

The Future of Work in India

Now about India. Today, a large number of recruitment companies in India are using this model to cut costs. Just last Saturday, someone from Pune told me that xxx runs a recruitment company wherein he has 34 recruiters who work from home!

Far from working from home, future offices will not only be paperless but virtual too. People will work only in factories, hospitals, hotels, etc., where their presence is mandatory. Others are just going to vanish from their offices!

Regards,
Dinesh V Divekar

Dear Dinesh,

I agree with you. One swallow does not make a summer. It is again one of the mistakes that Yahoo is committing unless it really makes face-to-face interaction and team spirit more meaningful and productive by making the workplace as exciting and innovative as that of Google or Facebook.

Yahoo was once at the top, and since then it has been sliding down. Search, Mail, and Chat were once its top products. Google made Internet search synonymous with itself. That should have made Yahoo see red. But they kept being complacent, and then Gmail became another word for emails.

Their most engaging product and the forerunner of social networking sites was the Yahoo chat. They could have made this hugely engaging activity as the Mother of All Networking sites. Imagine the possibility of adding or knowing someone in one's 'Yahoobook' immediately after having a very engaging, encouraging chat with someone. The idea of looking at someone's profile after knowing the person, first hand, through voice and video chat. In fact, this complete functionality is not available even today at any one particular site. In FB, one sends or receives invites from strangers, and knowing them takes time; what with the plethora of "shared" pics and thoughts; none reflect the real person. To indulge in messaging to know one person would just be a waste of time and effort.

Yahoo neither built upon its core competencies nor adopted any diversification, especially forward integration to social networking or e-commerce. In my opinion, it's a classic example of a static, adamant, stubborn organization that could not put its supremacy to good use.

Will the new diktat by its new CEO confirm this? I would be very happy to be proved wrong.

Warm regards.

I would rather have a few questions than an answer to this. Was there no supervision designed and risk mitigation planned when 'Work-From-Home' was implemented at Yahoo? How did the performance review work all this while? What about an audit of this process? What steps were taken when deviations were found in the delivery?

If these things were not in place or even attempted to be restored before taking the benefit away, who is to be questioned? Employees or their leaders?

We had a discussion on how to curb the misuse of 'Work-From-Home.' The focus remained on making the employees accountable and mitigating risk rather than withdrawing the benefit.

[Link: What happens when Work-From-Home policy is misused](https://www.citehr.com/448526-work-home-policy-being-abused-employees.html)

I was truly astonished to learn about this decision. I totally concur with (Cite Contribution). What kind of gap analysis did they conduct to arrive at this reasoning?

If the work assigned to the employee is being completed on time and with quality, whether working from home or in the office becomes immaterial. It's important to accept one's accountability and work towards it. 

Debates are raging on the CEO of Yahoo, Ms. Marissa Mayer's decision to ban "work from home" across the globe. However, I would like to clarify a few things here. Why do companies provide the facility of "work from home"? It is because it suits everybody. The reasons are as follows:

- It helps employees maintain work-life balance as there is no unnecessary wastage of time commuting to the office.
- At home, one is always relaxed.
- It is a major cost-cutting tool for companies. It saves the company's costs on power, water, office space, crèche, and so on.
- Lastly, it is not a "process" but a provision or facility. As long as deliverables are met, from where employees work does not matter.

As of now, this is only a decision, and we can assess its efficacy only after a year or later. To conclude that "work from home" has failed would be too sweeping a statement. In Marathi, there is a proverb "Suta varun swarga gathane" (its loose meaning is drawing conclusions by logical overreach). There is absolutely no guarantee that, taking a cue from Ms. Mayer, other software companies will follow suit.

When a CEO, especially of a company like Yahoo, decides to ban work from home, it should not be seen solely from the point of deliverables and KRA, etc. This is applicable up to the level of Project Manager, and that is all. Ms. Mayer's major challenge is to provide reasonable value to the shareholders' money. After taking over, she did not make significant gains as such, but she could elevate the confidence of the investors and arrest the downhill of the share value. This in itself is a major achievement.

The major challenge for Yahoo is a lack of innovation. Somewhere in 2007, two major companies, Google and Apple, entered the telecom segment and suddenly changed the rules of the game. The change was so comprehensive that it questioned the very existence of companies like Yahoo, Microsoft, Dell, HP, Nokia, etc. None of these companies are in a position to compete with Apple or Google. Though they ruled the roost at one time, business pundits question the existence of Microsoft after five years.

This is a classic example of leadership's obsession with vision. While setting the eyes beyond the horizon, also have a feel of the ground beneath you. What is the use of having eyes on the horizon if all of a sudden the ground starts shaking?

Today, Yahoo's major challenge is to show innovation in some segment. Most sectors are already taken over by Google. Where will it go? The search engine is no longer a potent source of revenue. Against Google's share of 66%, Yahoo stands at just 6%.

When Ms. Marissa Mayer made her decision, she wanted to improve people-to-people interaction. She wanted questions or challenges to come from colleagues. As of now, Yahoos are just doing what they are told to do. For software professionals, working from home is enough. However, it appears that Ms. Mayer wanted a big churning of ideas, and she believes that it can come from personal interaction, hence this decision.

In my training on "Strategy," I use the case study of Yahoo. Anyway, I am thankful to Ms. Mayer because of her new and strange decision, yet another leaf has been added.

Ok...

Dinesh V Divekar

Here's an open letter from a Yahoo Employee to the CEO: [Open letter](http://mrsniffen.tumblr.com/post/44600485954/an-open-letter-to-yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer)

Marissa Mayer's Leadership at Yahoo: A Cultural and Strategic Analysis

Marissa Mayer has been with Google ever since its incorporation in 1999. She has very little experience outside of Google. Yahoo founders and Google founders all started as PhD students at Stanford, although the former were much senior to the latter and became friends later on, notwithstanding the fact that Yahoo's search engine was earlier powered by Inktomi—a rival to Google. Later on, of course, Yahoo licensed the search from Google.

Despite such close proximity between the companies, in my opinion, Mayer is more a technology manager than a people manager. The culture, ethos, and everything about the two companies are entirely different—a very important aspect. It's not for nothing that the curriculum in all business schools focuses so much on organizational culture. Moreover, one needs to take the competencies into account while working on strategy.

The fact that while being appointed CEO last year, Mayer announced her pregnancy, worked from home herself, took a maternity leave (albeit a brief one), had a nursery and staff for her newborn child next to her office cubicle/chambers, joined with more than $3 million in salary and bonuses (apart from the generous ESOP at Google)—making her one of the highly paid CEOs—has not really endeared her to the Yahoo employees.

The fact that her diktat has given about 3 months of time (till June) to employees to comply or quit is seen more as a zero-cost lay-off plan for the company rather than any sincere attempts at close collaboration by physical presence in the office.

It remains to be seen whether this gamble will pay off or she will go the way of Carly Fiorina of HP, who joined with much fanfare and acclaim but was ousted later, much to the relief of employees, shareholders, and other stakeholders at HP.

Today is International Women's Day, and I wish the best to all women, whether managing home and household or office and workplace.

Warm regards.