A very interesting and potentially watershed story has emerged in recent days in business news. It concerns the top-down working conditions decision made by the recently selected CEO of Yahoo! Marissa Mayer. Ms. Mayer has announced that telecommuting among the company’s employees is to be eliminated. Although this decision was intended for internal dissemination only, it quickly leaked to the rest of us and has sparked a rapid and vociferous debate about productivity and innovation in cutting edge companies — and by extension to the rest of us.
To be clear, I have been and continue to be an enthusiastic proponent of any workplace practices that promote creativity, collaboration, autonomy, productivity, and civility. Among the exciting changes emerging within the post-industrial workplace has been employer recognition to adopt flexible working conditions, many of which achieve these very goals.
Common examples include open concept “office-less” workplaces that promote interaction and sharing, remote working via technology whether from home or other places conducive to production, and work settings that include benefits like childcare, gyms, and ping-pong tables.
The underlying management belief in these types of arrangements is that workplaces should be results-only-work-environments, encouraging employees to produce individual and even idiosyncratic styles, if measurable deliverables are realized.
A management approach embracing an attitude that trusts its employees to be value-producing when they are given freedom to choose schedules, environments, colleagues, and problem-solving approaches is the trend in working conditions. So why has Ms. Mayer, a product of Google, Silicon Valley, and data-driven decision making, made the move to eliminate one of the fastest growing flexible workplace practices, telecommuting? The apparent answer is to re-establish a lost culture of innovation.
Innovation has become the holy grail of business, particularly in the fast-paced Internet-based industry of services and content. Yahoo! was once a big player in the early days of the web. It was one of the first to establish one-place shopping for search, email, news, shopping and much more.
Since its mid-1990s launch, however, it has been losing market share to much bigger innovators such as Google, Apple, and Amazon, who currently dominate the web. Yahoo! is in trouble. Survivability is in doubt.
So, is corralling all employees back to the ranch going to reinvigorate an innovative edge and competitive advantage or is this a desperate move based in fear that if old fashioned business standards are not reapplied the company is going to sink? Time will tell, but this story does raise the question of what it takes to create work conditions that inspire workers to innovate and produce at optimal levels.
Encouraging high levels of creative performance in any workforce will result from valuing original problem solving and adaptability. When management applauds new ideas, the exercise of imagination, and learning from rather than avoiding mistakes, then innovation flourishes.
For most of us, unlearning the way we were educated can lead to more creativity. Our schools were designed to produce workers for the industrial age, not the much more sophisticated information age we have only just entered. Sameness, rigidity, and compliance characterize the way most of us were educated. Assessment methods have been little more than a means of measuring accountability or adherence to these standards.
This outdated education model is often replicated in too many businesses that value hanging on to tradition more than innovation. As a result, innovation is often stifled at a time when it is needed most to stay competitive and relevant. My concern with Yahoo!’s latest move is that it appears to be a reach for an old-styled accountability practice during a time of anguish. It is as if the thinking is non-traditional workforce practices are not giving us a competitive advantage, so let us go back to what worked in the old days.
I have no doubt Marissa Mayer will use data over time in determining what works and what does not work for fostering innovation at Yahoo!. For the rest of us we will have an interesting experiment to observe with lessons to be derived for the future of business and the facilitation of innovative workforces.
