The following is an excerpt from an article in flexibleboss by Philip Whiteley: Marissa Mayer, chief executive of Yahoo!, caused controversy in February this year by curbing home-working. She cited communication problems in the teams, and felt some people were taking advantage of the greater freedom that flexibility on hours and location allowed.
Unsurprisingly, there was sharp criticism. It was held to be a regressive move for employment practices, and for working parents in particular.
Many of these reactions, however, are based on some pretty old-fashioned notions of employee relations and business leadership. Then again, so are some of the voices backing the ‘work-in-one-place’ traditional approach.
Research on what actually makes for a high-performance, high-engagement workplace, offering great opportunities for staff, highlights the importance of issues that are almost completely neglected in conventional business training programmes, such as the MBA. The key issues turn out to be communications, morale, teamwork, prospects, and organizational culture, which are often wrongly dismissed as ‘the soft stuff’.
What matters is not where people are located, but how good their working relationships are. So was Ms Mayer’s move a good thing or a bad thing? Read the full article here.
