Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer set a cat among the pigeons (has anyone ever seen a cat among the pigeons? I haven’t) when she sent an e-mail to all company staff announcing an end to all home working as of 1 June.
Explaining the rationale for her decision, she wrote: "To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices."
Mayer argued that "some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home".
There was a predictably negative response from companies and employees where home working has become widely adapted or employers are considering making it so. IT businesses also weighed in against Mayer’s decision. It was easy to understand why as the decision appeared at odds with the prevailing trend toward workplace flexibility and worker mobility. Some also considered it an attack on BYOD, although it wasn’t.
There has been much discussion about whether Mayer’s arguments against home working stack up. Various pundits have opined one way or another on whether working from home increases or decreases employee productivity. The argument hasn’t been about the technology as the environment.
This is where the channel could make a big difference and carve out a significant role for itself with customers. No one disputes that the technology exists to make home working and mobile working available to businesses (and the technology is improving all the time) but the issue is whether it is being promoted and applied in the right way.
In Yahoo’s case, for instance, the nature of the organisation probably means it has few, if any, mobile workers as we would understand them (e.g. field sales people or engineers or delivery workers). So the culture that has grown up around home working – which was probably viewed at the time as a significant indicator of Yahoo’s ambitions to be a company of the future – is not necessarily linked to its suitability to the roles.
While some office-based workers probably could be transferred into a home-based environment without too much ado, many others might be better employed in a collaborative space where they can arrive at decisions and insights "from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people and impromptu meetings".
There’s no doubt that the marketing of BYOD and mobility by vendors and the industry as a whole has been confusing. While BYOD is connected to mobility because most of the devices are mobile rather than static ones, mobility is not specifically connected to home working which, as I have argued before, can be pretty static. The job of channel partners is to help businesses arrive at decisions that get the most out of their employees using IT in the most effective manner. At some level, this should require them to advise companies on which employees are truly mobile, which ones are suitable for home working and which of them would work better in an office.
In other words, while providing the IT infrastructure for mobile, home and office-based employees doesn’t really have to be that complicated, helping businesses to evolve a culture or company DNA that rationalises, justifies and supports them could be. There’s nothing radical in suggesting channel partners are well-positioned to fulfil that role if they can see beyond the technology to the business underneath it.
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