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.