This morning, the first thing I did was to make myself a coffee. The second was to check my emails. That way working from home starts straight away. It appears I have a few projects going on in Asia and, due to the time difference, we overlap for very few working hours a day. Also, there was an urgent message from an HR Director asking for some details. If I’d waited to be in the office to answer, without checking my emails with my coffee, this HRD would have had to wait until the next day, and surely would have had a negative experience as a result. Instead, he actually came back to me a bit later, thanking me for my efforts.
I am a lucky man. I work for a company in which, with a phone line, a computer and an internet connection, I can do 90% of my work outside the office – as with 90% of the modern services companies. We are not bound anymore to a desktop, a landline or a Personal Assistant. I don’t even have one. What for? I spend most of my days on Skype dealing with colleagues around the world (whom I would not see face-to-face if I was sitting in my office), on the phone with HR Directors or sending emails. My “best friend” is my brand new ultrathin laptop which I bring everywhere with me. With the globalisation of working sites, video conferences and conference calls are becoming the norm. And they can be done from practically anywhere.
Added to this new increase in remote working tools is the fact that commuting in busy cities is becoming a nightmare. Spending two to three hours a day on public transport is more the rule than the exception, creating high levels of stress and, obviously, a huge amount of lost time. Then, modern offices, built around the open-space concept, rarely allow for optimal concentration. Phones ringing, colleagues talking, coffee machine working… The ability to focus on a single subject for more than five minutes is more of an achievement than ever.
Finally, it is scientifically proven that companies offering home office achieve greater employee engagement, suffer less absenteeism and have a higher retention rate. Kenexa, an HR consulting company, studied the impact of homeworking on employees, and the results are outstanding. Employees granted home office are much more engaged and happier; they become ambassadors for their company and seem to feel that transparency and communications are more fluid.
As you will have gathered, I am a fervent believer in homeworking. And I push it as much as I can to my HR contacts, as an example of best practice. It has its limitations of course, but still, there are more positives than negatives.
So when a few months ago, Yahoo’s CEO, Marissa Mayer, launched her controversial measure banning all employees from homeworking, the world seemed to fall apart. Banning homeworking, at Yahoo – a tech company in which the main model is Google, where part of your time is actually allocated to doing whatever you want to do – seemed like a crazy idea.
We have all the tools to work from home, and most of us actually do a significant amount without accounting it to actual working time. Who doesn’t look at their emails during holidays, doesn’t answer the phone at night if they’re needed, doesn’t send emails at weekends? The separation between work and personal life has never been so thin. So why cut down on homeworking?
First, it seems that Marissa Mayer did something few CEOs do: she checked on VNP logs to find that, if all those people were not on the company network, “they couldn’t be working or contributing to Yahoo as a company” (news March 3rd 2013). Then, she came out with something I had already heard at a Top Employer company: “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. […] We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together,” Mayer said in her now widely-shared memo of February 22nd 2013.
As a matter of fact, the HRD of the certified company told me exactly the same. A high tech company in which most of the people focus on source code and are already little aware of what happens on the next screen (next door is too far) need to generate “humanity” or create bonds. And that is more likely to happen in front of a cup of coffee than through Twitter. This HRD, who had actually implemented a formal homeworking policy, with all insurances needed, a previous negotiation with the unions and so on, finally decided to restrict the homeworking possibility to its minimum expression – just to be used in case of ’flu, emergency, or in free time. But in working hours, everyone is in the office. If it has not been a great example of managing expectations, it’s still a great example of management, and of making tough decisions which are aimed at growing the business in a secure way, even if it demands a radical change in the way work is conceived.
My feeling is that homeworking shouldn’t be too formalized. I feel better being able to do it from time to time, to focus on one subject, to “think outside of the box”, because my daughter is sick, and to alternate this with time spent in the office (did I say I also have great international colleagues I really enjoy taking a coffee with?). If I were “obliged” to be homeworking every Thursday, then it wouldn’t feel that much of a privilege. And routine has never been a driver for engagement and motivation. When homeworking, I usually produce double the amount of work, because I also feel this privilege should be given back to my employer.
So, as a manager, I would offer homework to my employees, as long as they’ve shown their independence and their commitment to the company, but only exceptionally. Using homeworking as a flexible working condition tool seems better to me than offering it as a benefit.
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