Telecommuting versus Office Face Time

The blogs and papers have been full of Marissa Mayer’s policy to severely limit telecommuting at Yahoo! Since I am a huge fan of telecommuting and a rebel at heart, I initially bristled at her edict.  Then I read some more articles and thought about what she’s trying to achieve.  Grudgingly I have to say, she has a point.

Yahoo! is a company in crisis.  Ms. Mayer is the third CEO for the company in less than a year.   She has an uphill battle ahead of her, so it is all hands on deck.  But how did Ms. Mayer make this decision to end telecommuting?  Apparently she received important data from the logins to the company’s VPN network, and it conclusively showed too many people playing hooky.

The fortunate thing for Yahoo! employees is that they already have a well-designed office environment that fosters and encourages collaboration.  So when they return to the office, the environment will facilitate the creativity and teamwork necessary to hopefully pull Yahoo! up out of its quagmire.  Click here for some photos of their corporate HQ.

Does your current office design foster teamwork and collaboration?  Have you created areas within your office where team members can meet formally or chat informally around the water cooler?  Sometimes the spark of innovation strikes when you least it expect it. While watching foosball games between fellow brokers, I have had inspired moments which lead to collaboration and new business, so I am a firm believer.  Cubicles don’t always foster teamwork, so the breakout areas are more important than ever.  If you want to explore this new area of collaborative design, give me a call and I can show you some examples right here in Miami.