An experiment at Yahoo!

Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer ruffled some feathers last week when she made what has apparently become an unusual request/demand: She wants her company’s employees to actually show up in the office.

Employees who currently telecommute have been given until June to either make the office a regular part of their workday or leave the company. This has created an uproar, so much so that one media type even opined that it is taking Yahoo! back to the stone age. That was a time when tablets came with a chisel and they were pretty much worn out as soon as they were used (so it’s not that much different than Apple’s business model).

While I have never worked in the computer technology business, I have worked in another highly collaborative field, and I know what a headache it is when multiple members of your team are at outside offices, much less working from home: A newspaper newsroom.

At my most-recent stop almost all of our reporting staff was located at three bureau offices. For all but maybe three people (out of at least 50) in 12 years, this did not create major issues. I had the utmost respect for my co-workers and knew they did their jobs every day and did them well. But I think it could have been even better if we were in the same room on a regular basis.

With news-gathering, you want folks out getting stories rather than sitting at their desk waiting for something to happen. Nothing ever happens in a newsroom, except for the occasional microwave popcorn fire. But when it comes time to write those stories, and come up with ideas for following them, the team really needs to be in the same place.

While I’m sure a lot can get done over Skype or exchanging e-mail, I think you need at least some face-to-face contact with your co-workers to truly forge a team. How does a new employee become part of this effort when they might never actually meet many of the people they are working with?

As a result of our reporting staff being decentralized, we would occasionally face problems caused by poor communications. They included:  Two people working on the same story, three people working on the same story (how many people need to write the main bar for a snowstorm?), nobody working on something that obviously needed to be covered, someone writing a story that had already been written by one of their coworkers the week before, and someone writing a story that had already been written by one of their coworkers the month before.

We had several occasions where new staff members went months before meeting someone else integral to the operation, typically the page designers and reporters who usually worked different schedules. But if they were working in the same building, I suspect they would have eventually seen each other in the hall or the newsroom long before we would have a meeting that would bring the entire staff together. It’s kind of hard to foster much teamwork when you don’t even know who your teammates are.

Telecommuting has its place: The weather is bad, someone in the house is sick and I need to be close by, I am working on a project that really requires some alone time. But the office is where things get done, and decisions are made, so employees need to expect they will be there more often than not. Then, if it turns out the supervisor and employee can work out other arrangements, I don’t have an issue.

Such was the nature of the beast, and you find a way to get it done. But it would be a lie to call it ideal. I often compared it to the newsroom Harrisonburg, where you couldn’t help but see what was going on, and it was easy for an editor to find someone to make the police calls or go to the scene of a fire, or file an extra story if something else had fallen through.

At the same time, the reporters could see how their story made its way from their desks to those of the editors. And, if it was a particularly busy night, it was easy to offer a hand.

Teamwork requires contact that I think you can only get in person. Sitting around a table, or standing around the water cooler, bouncing ideas off each other.

Christina thinks Yahoo! will lose a lot of good people as a result of this. That certainly is possible, although it is also a way to clear the decks of some folks who might not have been as productive as remote workers as they could have been.

Whatever the reason, as leader of Yahoo!, Mayer has the right to try this course of action and see if it helps or hinders the company that has long been Avis to Google’s Hertz. As someone who knows the pitfalls of decentralized work environments, I’m hoping Yahoo! gets the results it is looking for.

Playoff time

The high school basketball playoffs are upon us and I had my first game for the Register on Friday night as OCVarsity.com staffed 14 contests. Mine was a 2AA game featuring Thousand Oaks, which had to travel about 60 miles down the 101 and 405 to Marina High School and Westminster. There is always traffic on the 405, so it did not surprise me that the Thousand Oaks cheerleaders only got to Huntington Beach midway through the first period. By the time they got there, the Lancers were up 7-1, and despite the long trip they cruised to the win. Anyway, here is a link to the coverage.

http://www.ocvarsity.com/articles/westminster-36007-hit-lions.html

Iron's exit a new wrinkle for Monopoly

So for the past month I have been getting the occasional item in my Facebook newsfeed concerning Hasbro’s plans to get rid of one of the iconic Monopoly pieces of my youth. I figured they would conduct this survey and then take a few days before announcing the piece that really was history and what would replace it.

Instead, the voting closed last night and this morning I awoke to find out that my beloved iron is getting the boot. It will be replaced by a cat in new versions of the game, however it should come to nobody’s surprise that Hasbro will be putting out a Golden Token Bonus set that will include all of the current tokens and the five suitors for the open spot in the lineup. So a lot of this was – shocker – a way for Hasbro to get some attention to what might be a flagging brand.

I know, I hate it too, the idea that Monopoly, the king of board games over the past seven decades, needs to pull a stunt to make people try to remember the last time they played. I am still trying to figure that out myself.

I remember spending many summer evenings playing Monopoly at my cousin Ricky’s house on Smith Street while visiting my grandmother in Pennsylvania. I got an anniversary set at some point that includes a spinner to hold the property deeds, although that one was (and still is) back in Virginia, so I would head over to Ricky’s after supper (as opposed to dinner, but that is another story for another day) and we’d play for a couple of hours. Our games usually ended amicably, which is saying something since there are a lot of stories out there about games that end in fights. Or frankly just end because they were taking too long.

My current Monopoly set was purchased when Jamesway was going out of business in Luray in the mid-1990s. It is a 60^th anniversary set in a box shaped like Trivial Pursuit, and the board even unfolds like the one used in that game. The tokens are apparently modeled on the ones from Monopoly’s early days, and are also golden colored, so I think I’ll need to hang on to the older game for what I see as an authentic iron.

The iron was among the less-flashy tokens, so it should not surprise me that it didn’t make the count. I saw elsewhere on the internet that the wheelbarrow was the second-least popular. I know that I only used it when the iron was already claimed. Most players seem to like the racecar and the Scottie the best, but a few of these pieces are more questionable than the iron.

For example, the shoe. It’s just one shoe, not a pair, so what is its true worth? I guess it makes sense from the perspective that an unpaired shoe makes a great doorstop, so it could also be a game token.

I always thought the hat was not a very balanced piece of metal, and the horse was the only token among those in my first Monopoly sets that needed to be on a pedestal. The rest stood on their own.

When the news broke this morning, I mentioned it to Christina, and she seemed to process it and move on. Then, half an hour later, I hear from the kitchen: “Wait a minute. They still have the f---ing thimble?”

The impending loss of the iron sent me to the closet where we keep our board games, and there are lots of great memories stored there. Christina and I have started playing Mille Bornes again, which has already been the source of great fun. My 30-year-old Risk game is up there, and that got a lot of use in summers back in Chesterfield County, but not much in recent years.

I still have Payday and Gambler, two great Parker Brothers games of the 1970s and 1980s, and Scattergories, plus all kinds of versions of Trivial Pursuit. I also have a terrific game called Out of Context, which is a quote-guessing game we used to play at John Waybright’s house when the Page News and Courier news staff got together for, ahem, strategy meetings.

Finding time (and people) to get together and play these great games is not that easy these days, but trips down memory lane like this make me wish it was. And maybe there will be an opportunity to do so again.

But right now, my main concern is this disrespect for the iron. And I’m steamed.