How to keep ‘work from home’ employees accountable—without spying
REPORT: VPN logs led to Yahoo telecommute ban It’s true that Yahoo denied making any broad statement about the practice; that most telecommuters can distinguish their situation from that of their counterparts at Yahoo and Best Buy, another struggling company that’s tightening its telecommuting policy; that many employers have too much invested in telecommuting to go back now. But the Yahoo affair has forced us to consider the downside of a work style that has been hailed as the solution to everything from air pollution to the dog’s need for an afternoon walk. Its benefits are modest but numerous. I don’t see it going away. Ravi Shankar Gajendran Ravi Shankar Gajendran, a University of Illinois business professor who’s spent years studying telecommuting, says the furor “illustrates a fundamental tension about telecommuting: Is it a business strategy, or some sort of employee right, like health insurance?” Translation: Is telecommuting good for employer or employee? Both, Gajendran says. “Its benefits are modest but numerous. I don’t see it going away.” Last month, Mayer said she would end Yahoo’s work-at-home policy to foster collaboration and innovation by bringing employees physically together All hands on deck! Mayer, who joined Yahoo from Google last year, apparently was dismayed by the vacant parking spaces and cubicles at Yahoo headquarters, and by a check of VPN logs that reportedly showed a decided lack of remote worker engagement. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer.
For the original version including any supplementary images or video, visit http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/03/11/the-work-from-home-tug-of-war/1979457/
Collexions daily standup meeting uses of Skype and a 65-inch TV with built-in camera to keep remote and in-house employees on the same page. Thanks to social networks, people are becoming more effective at expressing small thoughts online, Taylor says. The wiki allows them to express themselves in this way, and it allows people to overhear the conversation, and keep it going. It also creates accountability, because we know when someone said something if its written on the wiki. Also vital to Collexion is Asanas task management software (the same program used at Ordr.in.), which allows employees to create and assign tasks to otherseven the boss. It can be hard for some people, but weve worked to create a culture from the top down where its okay to send a task to your boss. We dont want people sending email, we want them sending tasks, Kirwan says.
For the original version including any supplementary images or video, visit http://www.pcworld.com/article/2032004/how-to-keep-work-from-home-employees-accountable-without-spying.html
A February study from Stanford University found that when employees of a Chinese travel agency were allowed to work from home, they were 13 percent more productive than when they worked in the building, ultimately saving the company $2,000 per person per year. Is it easier to have everyone in the same place? Yeah, of course it is. But that doesnt mean its always better, says Brett Caine, senior vice president and general manager of Citrix Online, a mobile networking company. Telecommuting has allowed me to have a career as well as be a mother, wrote an irate digital mom on Babble after the Yahoo announcement. But its just as popular among childless employees as parents. And mothers are no more likely to work from home than fathers, according to Telework. Its kind of a shame that it gets made into a mommy thing, because its families in general who need this flexibility, says Kate Lister, Teleworks president. Face time is still critical to ones career. According to researchers Kimberly Elsbach and Daniel Cable, people who show up to the office are more likely to be promoted or receive better performance reviews than their remote co-workers. Just being seen at work, without any information about what youre actually doing, leads people to think more highly of you, they wrote in the summer 2012 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review.
For the original version including any supplementary images or video, visit http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-25/why-wont-yahoo-let-employees-work-from-home