You know the scene: the passionate devotees waiting for a sign of white smoke, the speculation over exactly how much reform the sclerotic organization can withstand, the media frenzy giving the telling details of the elected leader’s life, the joy and anticipation for great things to come.
I am speaking, of course, of Yahoo and its still-new leader, CEO Marissa Mayer. The anointed one has already cleaned the horoscopes, emoticons, and gossip from the Yahoo homepage, which for the past five or so years fully lived up to the organization’s name. Only yahoos went there.
But how much reform can the organization take? Apparently there is a difference between “reform” and “inconvenient reform.”
Because, sure enough, when Ms. Mayer sent a memo to her employees demanding that people (warning: the rest of this sentence is for mature audiences only) show up at an office, there was a strong reaction from a surprisingly extensive remote-work-ocracy.
Don’t get me wrong. I write this blog from my home, and when I am done I send it to an editor who may make revisions or ask questions before approving its publication. The interaction is transacted remotely and is satisfactory in all respects.
And, my editor and I have never met.
However – and here I am guessing – I bet the editor does significant editorial work at home and also significant work in an office. Custom-manufacturing a magazine on a deadline means that coordinating with others, sharing ideas, and quickly problem-solving the oh-shoot moments have to be done face to face.
And I bet that most professionals who work remotely (they are, almost by definition, professionals) do not notice any difference in the quality of the remote interaction and the in-person interaction. I’m sure they would reason that the same people are doing the same work, empowered by technology that quickly reproduces their efforts.
What, they would say, is the diff? Here is what Mayer said, according to the Huffington Post:
To become the absolute best place to work, 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. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home.
I suspect that the emphasis on collaboration and communication in Yahoo’s memo is lost on those who work remotely, and I think I know why: Loss of collaborative quality, if and when it happens, occurs in increments too small to be noticed by the participants. In the same way, by the way, we don’t notice when colleagues lose weight or when we ourselves go gray.
But as an outside observer of many organizations, I have, in fact, noticed the almost wholesale change in the quality of teamwork. To my mind it is almost wholly a result of remote work.
I think that we need to see the look in our collaborator’s eyes, to confirm and reconfirm a detail, to pick up where we left off and give the collaborative spark that would die in an email exchange a chance to become a flame.
And while many of the tech-oriented generation may be insulted by such an assault on remote work, my recent visit to a hotbed of high-tech tells me that young people value close collaboration as much as Mayer.
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I visited the office of Gener8tor, a Madison business accelerator that seems to be part venture capital firm, part consulting firm, and part real-estate firm. That description may jolt the principals (of whom I will write in the future), but for this analysis it is the real estate that interests me. Or, more specifically, the intense nature of the collaboration of the people – who actually meet in an office!
The plan is open, the meetings are free-form, and the atmosphere is charged with excitement. I saw none of the office foolishness of The Office, none of the mumbling staple-hoggers of Office Space, none of the hard-charging women executives of Ocean’s Eleven. (I saw no women at all, but my visit was short and my eyes aren’t so good. But maybe Mayer is bringing them all back.)
Anyway, when you are starting up a company, you do it in the company of others. When you are turning a company around, you do the same. If Mayer and her Yahoo team are starting a trend, I salute it.
Because we need each other in order to do great things.
Pax.
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