Yahoo Working From Home Ban Hopes to Boost Morale

About two weeks ago, Yahoo rocked its employees’ world by announcing that working from home is no longer an option. Naturally, this move raised a lot of eyebrows – and probably blood pressures as well. Yahoo, not unlike many other companies, has allowed its employees to work from home, and just like with most other changes, the  telecommute ban was not received well.

What prompted Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer to implement the telecommute ban?

Bear in mind that Mayer came from Google, where the atmosphere is rather different from Yahoo. Google employees work on site, and some even live on campus. We’ve heard and seen how “awesome” life as a Google employee can be, and we have seen a lot of innovative products come out of that huge conglomeration of brains.

Going to Yahoo, Mayer probably couldn’t help but notice the couple of hundred employees who worked from home. In fact, it is said that some of these employees do not do a lot of work for Yahoo and even have their own businesses on the side. This is being cited as one of the factors that prompted Mayer to implement the telecommute ban.

Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, Mayer wants to create and nurture a new company culture, one that will allow innovation and collaboration to thrive. In the lingo of today’s youngsters, Mayer wants the company to be cool again.

Empty Yahoo offices like this are probably going to be a thing of the past with Mayer’s new Telecommuting ban.

But isn’t allowing telecommuting cool?

It’s really more of creating an atmosphere where the employees know each other and interact face to face. According to Yahoo, the move is not waging war against remote workers per se. It’s just that getting people into the cubicles and corridors (to stimulate real-life water cooler talks, for one) is what Yahoo needs at the moment. They want to boost the morale of the company and its workers, and this is one way they think they can achieve that goal.

Will it work? Perhaps not on its own. It looks like Yahoo has deeper issues than the 200 remote workers, but knowing how Marissa Mayer gets things done, she has a plan which will get her where she wants to be.

[Image via officesnapshots]