No, Quartz, We Won’t Stop Working From Home!
The story in Quartz deriding “millennials” who work from home pissed me off. Here’s the response I sent them, which I doubt they’ll publish:
It’s pretty obvious you don’t know how to work from home. Too bad the despised “millennials” have matured enough to do it and you haven’t. That’s OK, I can give you some clues:
- You need to stop working on any old surface, and dedicate a space to work, and primarily work. This is your HOME OFFICE, even if it’s just a desk in the corner. No more laptop on the kitchen table.
- Your manager(s) need to learn how to manage a remote team based on results, not on whose butt is in a visible desk when. They need to set core hours when you are expected to be available for rapid communication.
- You need to actually learn how to work with multiple communication tools, not just Slack and email. Videoconferencing lets you see “body language and vocal tone” — cameras are good for that (but you can’t work in your PJs).
- You need to learn how to draw your own boundaries between work and the rest of your life, instead of expecting your boss and co-workers to do it all for you. It’s part of being an adult.
- You need to learn to manage your own time and productivity, not expect to be able to clockwatch your day away.
If you do these things right, you can be more productive and just as engaged as some poor slob crammed into an open plan office with fifty or more other noisy, rude, and frustrated people trying to do actual work while wearing loud headphones to tune out the din. The vaunted water cooler collaboration works just fine in Slack, maybe even better because you can remember it when you get back to your “desk”. Plus you don’t risk getting the flu (or pneumonia) over Slack.
Employees tend to be more engaged when they own their work, own their space, own their interactions with others and own their schedules. Working remotely, when managed properly for results, provides this ownership.
Mayer’s ban on working remotely was due to the fact that most of Yahoo’s managers had no clue as to how to manage remote workers, so she penalized everyone for the abuses and incompetencies of a few. (I worked for Yahoo at the time.) IMO, Best Buy and HP are companies in just as much trouble market-wise as Yahoo (HP after Fiorina is a shell of what it was), and for the same reason — middle management suckage and rot from the top.
While you might be an extrovert who needs constant personal interaction (and maybe supervision), there are many of us in the tech space that find that kind of thing stifling, a waste of time, and detrimental to actual accomplishment and productivity.
Oh by the way, it’s not just “millennials” who like to work remotely: I’m 55, and much prefer the quiet of my home office to the open plan cesspit that is in place in most “modern” offices. I think better of myself than to enjoy working in a digital sweatshop, thank you.
Addendum: Other authors have explored this topic on Medium over the years. One such article is Be happy working on your own by Andrei Draganescu.
