March 1, 2013
There’s been a lot of hullaballoo over the Marissa Mayer decision to stop telecommuting as a standard rule. I thought I was done with talking about it and hearing about it but there was something that still got under my skin.
My reaction? That sucks from a work-life perspective but what’s the business decision behind it?
We don’t know. We aren’t privy to how productive their workers are, we aren’t privy to the balance sheet, we can’t see what she’s aiming to do.
Mayer’s decision is based on what she thinks is right for the business.
Right or wrong, she is the CEO. Her job is to make those decisions.
Personally, as an uninformed outsider, I would extrapolate that the Yahoo employees are actually not as productive as they could be. Yahoo’s been failing as a business for years, and that’s indicative of a failure on several levels: their business model doesn’t work, the employees aren’t excelling, the managers are not doing their jobs to ensure productivity in the office or from telecommuters.
Evidence?
Look at how far behind Yahoo’s lagged in maintenance on their existing products, on developing innovative products, on not eating their putative competition’s dust. Can anyone compare Yahoo and Google without laughing?
What does Yahoo excel at? As their consumer, I’d say nothing.
I still (shockingly) use them because I can’t be arsed to transition everything but they don’t excel at search, at mail, or at news. What’s left? They needed a big kick in the pants, or five, because they’re mediocre, or subpar. That’s not a business I’d invest in.
It’s not inconceivable that this decision makes the most sense FOR YAHOO RIGHT NOW, taking into consideration where they are and the abuses of the system as noted by this Business Insider article.
Bottom Line: If it were working for them, why the hell would she change the policy? If it isn’t working for them, then it’s her responsibility to change it. She was hired to turn a company around. She’d better be doing what it takes.
I can’t stand the claims that she’s a disappointment to feminists…
….that she was the Great Freaking Women’s Hope and she owes the employees a nursery because she gets a private one, or that she’s setting the company back to the stone ages.
She leads a business that employs people. It can employ people only so long as the business is successful, and of course it needs people in order to be successful. Circle of life.
Within that circle, employers provide jobs that pay a wage. “Life essential” benefits like health care, dental, and time off would be nice, even expected from this type of company. Perks like gyms, free food, free transit, subsidized or conveniently located childcare, flexible schedules, etc., are even nicer. They are, however, the mark of a company that has both the money and the willingness to provide them. A competitive company will. One that is struggling to survive will pick and choose. (BI notes, btw, she is willing to provide some of those other perks.)
At the end of the day, it’s a job, not a belief system. They have the right and responsibility to run their business best they can, all employees have the right and responsibility to make the best decision for their lives.
A, As a feminist, I’m tired of the focus on her decision as a woman and as a businesswoman, I’m tired of the insistence that all telecommuters are productive because they’ve been doing it so long.
It shouldn’t matter if she’s a man, woman, teal, or an elephant. It’s not her responsibility to prop up a policy that doesn’t work so that employees are happy. It’s her responsibility to take the long-view, make the business work, make it productive and profitable otherwise there won’t be a company.
B, It’s called WORK from home. It’s being available for conference calls, contributing to solutions, brainstorming creatively, creating new solutions, completing projects.
It’s not: work while with your kids, work and play with the dog, or work when someone’s paying attention and then run errands, or work while helping kids with their homework. Believe me, those conference calls where someone’s helping with homework or soothe a crier can suck.
Having childcare, flexible schedules and telecommuting are all different things. Great or very necessary, depending on your life, but they cannot be conflated.
Being able to set your work aside for two hours in the day to pick up the kids, run errands or take multiple breaks throughout the day w/o affecting your work, productivity or reputation: flexible scheduling.
Being able to take your child to the doctor, play with them, help them with their homework, feed them: childcare.
Being able to work with your laptop on your sofa or in bed or at the dining room table instead of in the office: working from home.
These are all good things. They are, however, NOT the same thing. Mayer’s nursery (childcare) = your ability to work from home? False equivalence. She has childcare while she’s at work but that’s not the same as being home to take care of your kids while you’re working.
Working from home also doesn’t confer ability to do everything you wanted to do at home AND work, nor the ability to split yourself in two. If PiC has the day off when I don’t, I still can’t talk or hang out: I’m working. Yes, it saves you a commute, but the trade off is the ease of face to face conversations that resolve issues in two minutes.
Related: the assumptions people make about working from home drives me (and Andrea) insane.
No, I don’t have time to sit and chat on the phone for an hour.
No, I can’t just come and have a 2 hour lunch.
NO, I can’t make your travel arrangements because I’m good at it so I must enjoy doing that instead of my work during my work day. I have work to do! It’s like I’m in an office.
I worked from someone’s home with his children and guess what happened? I had a kid crawl in my lap every twenty minutes, every single time that child could sneak past her caretaker (surprisingly frequently) insisting on having me “Look! Watch! Come!”, and I couldn’t kick her out. She wouldn’t STAY out anyway. Bet your tuchus I wasn’t answering emails.
This is not uncommon. I’ve worked with many parents trying to work while they were caretaking and they were always distracted; all the colleague-parents who worked from home routinely arranged childcare during the day because they couldn’t do both at the same time.
When Doggle was sick, I spent a week looking after him from home. when I was trying to juggle him and work, my productivity was at 25%. When they were divided, it was 100% him for 6 hours and 100% work for 3 hours.
This isn’t to say laziness isn’t present in the office – of course it is. I’ve had coworkers who didn’t work more than 2 hours a day in the office and 0 outside of it. It took a manager really willing to do her job to put an end to that.
Bottom line: Working from home is great but not when you’re distracted. You are productive when you’re working, not when you’re taking care of your personal life, no matter where you are. A business can’t stay in business if they aren’t effectively managing problems.
C, What corporate CEO isn’t privileged? Heck, non-corporate, non-profit CEOs can be too. She chose to exercise her privilege on a nursery. CEOs also have luxury travel options, massive salaries, they have assistants, secretaries and a dozen other services at their beck and call. The fact that she has a nursery may feel like a slap but why aren’t people bitching about those luxuries that other CEOs have? Is the childcare arrangement of any other CEO discussed and held up as a Call to Action? Working dad CEOs aren’t being called out to provide X because they have Y.
Her responsibility at Yahoo is to run Yahoo as well as she can. Her calls may be good, they may be bad, but the focus on motherhood, working womanhood, to fuel the mommy wars, basically, zeroing in on the fact that she’s a woman is GROSS. To quote Allison.
As a feminist, who believes in equal opportunities, not gender-based special treatment, I’m disgusted with that angle.
:: Alison at Ask A Manager succinctly sums it up.
December 29, 2011
Money has been a weird thing of late. And weird in odd chunks. Mostly me making mistakes. I haven’t paid the stupid tax in a while but it burns me up just like days of yore. Even if it doesn’t immediately cause me to miss other bills anymore, it still gets my goat because it’s going to get in the way of other goals.
* I saved myself 10% on a big order from Ann Taylor by reordering everything at 50% off instead of 40% off. Except carelessly, didn’t notice that at 50% off, my order was $25 shy of the free shipping (no code needed) minimum that I usually never miss and cost myself an extra $13. Kicked myself up and down the street for that and couldn’t get a reprieve from the company. I’m going to have to return most of those items because only one thing fit well so I’ll have saved myself pretty much nothing.
* Bought PiC two pairs of potentially really nice sneakers from Amazon’s sister deal site at a steep discount but made the mistake of letting it charge to my credit card instead of using the rest of my gift card balance. Ended up having to return them both as neither fit well and now I have a whole lot of extra Amazon credit. Which I promptly dug into.
* I tried to transfer a large amount of money from one Chase account to another ING account. Carelessly slipped when selecting from the dropdown menu and grabbed the wrong Chase account – the one that never has real money in it. !!! @(#*$(#!!!
* Received a bill from the dentist, which rather annoyed me because if my recent visit was going to incur cost above and beyond, I am accustomed to having the amount estimated at the time of the visit. I planned to drop by the office to pay it by CC. Frankly, I’ve been a little busy. A lot busy. It’s also only been about two weeks. Another bill came in the mail and they’ve adjusted the price downward by $53. No reason given. Hrm.
* I have GOT to get on the ball with figuring out creative flight financing for our honeymoon. Those prices are giving me heartburn like a … well. You know.
Is anyone else’s dander up?
September 1, 2009
Might as well call it an All-Spend day!
1. Returned stuff to Kohl’s. Forget $10 off $20 coupon, so didn’t pick up a few things which means I’ll have to make another trip some other time.
2. Dropped off dry cleaning: $6. They’ll get it done by tomorrow. Why do the turnaround times vary SO MUCH? Some things are done next day, others are scheduled for a 6 day pick up. Weird.
3. Starbucks, $1.10. Fruitless attempt to use their free wi-fi to get some work done.
4. Ordered printer, $106 after GC. Estimated ship/delivery time is on the order of two weeks. Rebellious part of me is screeching, order it from Staples and get it in 4 days!! Am studiously ignoring because the saved $25 went straight to a ….
5. CBLDF membership, $25. Chose not to receive any membership premiums (gifts) so that the money will go further.
The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is dedicated to preserving the first amendment rights of comic book professionals and fight censorship in the United States. As Neil Gaiman (both a comic creator and a CBLDF board member) notes, “abstract political freedoms are a very good thing.”
6. Researched local women’s shelters/charities that accept professional clothing for homeless or battered women. Friend has lots of professional clothing she has no further use for, and she’d like it to go to a good cause. The one I’m thinking of is Dress for Success, but the only Southern California location that accepts clothing is San Diego. Does anyone have any suggestions?
More to do, but working on #6 until I’m through. This is a rare attempt to NOT multitask.
August 10, 2009
Fast on the heels of my declaration of independence from one kind of family tie, I face another.
What does one do, when simply listening to the cadence of another’s speech, the emotion, knowing that the little tears in the corners of the eye, the breaking voice, were all just cues built in meant specifically for manipulation [to my ears], drives you into a hands-shaking rage?
No, that’s not healthy. But that IS family.
I’ll be honest. I’ve been avoiding my brother via the cold shoulder and various other defensive-shunting techniques for the past few months because every time I even consider having a sit-down with him, I get angry. It took two months to pen a response to his most recent outrageously audacious “I’m trying ever so hard, and btw, can I get a little more free rein around here if I help out some more?” missive. Are you kidding me? Because I’m pretty sure that was followed up by a distinct period of doing less. I never sent it because I wanted to be sure this was a battle worth engaging in.
Frankly, I just didn’t want to hear it. Not the excuses, not the whining, not the plaints that he’s trying soooo hard. None of it. Don’t care. Haven’t seen it, and don’t care. Patience hath boiled over and boiled off in this little pot, and the last thing we needed was steam in this already sweltering heat. Yet, how long can you ignore a family member who lives feet away from you? [At last count … three and a half months. We’re restarting the clock.]
Seriously, though. He actually came and apologized for being too loud, which he was, but really, it was an apology because he’d gotten caught. And for what? For the dumbest thing — I wasn’t out to catch him! I’d just remembered to take out the trash! [Serious. Check my Twitter. I’d just gone out to get the trash and ran into him outside.]
Jeepers. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear I was living in a trailer park, about to get shipped out to Jerry Springer.
So now I feel obligated to give the real verbal thrashing for the real issues I’m angry about – of which there are many, and of those many, all are justified – since I had to listen to his idiotic sob stories despite doing my darndest to avoid them and the angry rant I’ve got to deliver. It’s only fair. If he’d just left me alone, I wouldn’t have to play the parent role again. Jerk. *scowl*
June 9, 2009
It’s June 9th.
I still haven’t gotten feedback or follow-up from the place I really really want to hear from, and I have a couple anemic freelance options to consider.
One is a lock but it’s just a favor for a family friend, a one-off deal that I could probably complete in a solid week.
The other is something I really don’t want because it’s going to a huge mess to navigate (workload + politics — TONS of politics) but it may come down to that or unemployment. I’d rather put off the latter for a while longer if there’s a solid financial advantage to making this commitment. We’re in talks this week. A very “we’ll see” situation.
I’ve done my best to keep maintain Zen-mode since the end of last month but it’s slipping from my grasp like a wiggly water toy you play with at the Discovery Channel Store.
The delicate fabric of that calm is revealed when those closest to me ask the most innocent questions about my plans or job situation. It feels something like a vise of atmospheric pressure closing in, reminding me that I still haven’t got my life ordered properly and by the way, young lady, what do you intend to do with your life when you grow up? I’m not sure which movie character menacingly delivers that line, but I’m properly chastised/chagrined every time.
No answer, I’m afraid. But I’ll repair the bastions of calm and move along my day. Trying not to fret too much about the terrifying maw of a completely unscheduled life after a date three weeks into the future.
Strange. Writing about it is rather calming.
May 6, 2009
Has anyone else had a problem with their account aggregators of late? For the past 3 months, Yodlee has given me error messages for my ING and ED accounts and I’ve been growling at it under my breath. They finally told me that the contact was being limited at ING and ED’s end today. ING’s reply to my inquiry into the veracity of this statement:
I understand that you recently had an issue trying to connect to our website using Yodlee. This service is commonly referred to as an account aggregator. While this service may have worked in the past, most users are finding that their aggregator does not work with our New Sign In Process.
The security of your information is very important to us. Once your personal information leaves ING DIRECT, we have no control over your information or how it is used by third parties. Because we have no way of monitoring how account aggregators address security, privacy or the use of cookies we are unable to support the use of these services.
To best protect your personal information and your funds, we recommend that you do not share your personal information (including your Customer Number and PIN) with any third party.
Thank you,
XXXX
ING DIRECT USA
This pretty much infuriates me. Why did it take Yodlee this long to tell me what the real problem was? Why did I keep getting useless “we’re working on it” and “the problem has been resolved” messages?
And ING! And ED! Why do ING and ED get to arbitrarily decide that they’re not going to allow you to allow access to your own accounts?
I feel like I’m being flung back into the personal finance era of 2001 before I discovered account aggregation and had to sign into every single account manually.
I am not a happy ING Direct customer. Why can’t we have the choice about whether or not we’re going to share our personal information with a relatively secure third party? Is it my account or not?
~~~~~~~~~~~~
And while I’m on my soapbox about losing personal control to a faceless entity that “knows what’s best” for me:
This Reuters article about The End of Personal Finance really put my back up. Of course individuals can’t take care of, plan for, or be prepared for every single possible disaster in life, and expect to succeed. But to suggest that “personal finance” primarily consists of hot stock tips and therefore, personal responsibility was simply a pipe dream? *deep breath* And the implication that taking responsibility at all – under the “guise” of a misdefined personal finance – is actually usurping the “rightful role of the government?” That has me sputtering in outrage. Ridiculous.
The government is not our life-support parental unit! Heck, my actual parental units don’t expect to support me for the rest of my life, as well as my kids’ lives. And you bet that I’m disabusing brother of the notion that he’s got the right to that as well.
*grumble*