Resource Management: Yahoo Got It Way Wrong

Yahoo’s decision to stop letting employees work from home is about as smart as most of the product decisions they have been making lately: Way off the mark.

Was Marissa Mayer hibernating in some cave for the last several years then woke up and said: “Where is everybody?”

They are at home working very well thank you – and if you make them all come back to work every day, you will be losing some of the best resources you have, plus losing out on a very creative way to maximize your employee assets.

Simon Kennedy in a recent blog post on DNA writes: “Marissa Mayer’s decision to order Yahoo! Inc staff to work in the company’s offices runs counter to new research published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.” He goes on to quote the National Bureau of Economic Research whose results “showed home-working led to a 13% increase in performance, mainly reflecting reductions in sick days and breaks. The rest was attributed to making more calls per minute thanks in part to the quieter working environment.”

 And this didn't even take into account the fact that people who work from home spend time on work activities well beyond the normal 8 hour work day.

I can understand a leader trying to turn around a company by taking some drastic measures to improve performance. But I think this was a knee jerk reaction based on faulty data. In the long run this will be just one more stupid move Yahoo has made. Yahoo is traditionally 2 steps behind in their marketplace, and apparently they are at least two steps behind in employee workplace trends as well.

I guess, in the end, this decision (along with many others at Yahoo) will serve as great case-study fodder for future MBAs. I would suggest a title for the case study should be: Yahoo: A study in Bad Timing.

Guess they won’t be making next year’s 100 Best Places to Work List.

Read more blogs by Jerry on Toolbox For HR

Six Reason You May Want to Consider “Coworking”

“Working Alone Sucks.”  (Sign outside NextSpace office in San Jose, California.)

In a recent Fast Company article entitled, Working Beyond the Cube they talk about a growing trend for companies to locate their employees in “coworking” environments. Essentially this means you have employees from several different companies all working together in the same place. Traditionally these were havens for freelancers and the unemployed. But the model has matured and is now actively considered as part of the office space strategy for more and more companies.

Apparently there are around 90,000 people who work in coworking spaces today.

So why might you or your company consider coworking in the future? Here are six reasons to consider:

1. Collaboration: studies find (and coworker experience supports) that people who work together from varying different companies, backgrounds and cultures can be more productive and more innovative.
2. Remote Worker Accommodation: do you struggle with remote workers being disengaged, out of the loop, feeling less motivated? Stick them in a coworking facility.
3. Space Flexibility: Need to staff up for a project, have to grow fast (or shrink fast)? Coworking is the answer. Use these facilities as “flex space.”
4. Renew and re-energize: People who are exposed to new people, new ideas, new surroundings are often re-energized. Coworking facilities mix and mingle all sorts of people.
5. Project Orientation: when you have new projects you can move people in and out of these coworking facilities.
6. Cost: And of course, lastly, there is the question of cost. Compared to building and maintaining your own space, these facilities can be much less expensive.

One telling quote from the Fast Company article says that “Chris Mach, a global workplace strategist from AT&T …is placing dozens of researchers, product developers, and technologists in coworking hubs across the country and has invited startups and partners to work alongside them. The goal: spot talent, inspire creativity, and get products to market faster.”

In my own home town, Fort Collins, Colorado, we have a local business incubator called the Rocky Mountain Innosphere. They built a building with this very concept in mind. Create a space were multiple innovative companies can be collocated to foster the innovation dialog. It’s working.

I am thinking I might be in need of setting myself up in a coworking location because; while I am getting a lot of value working at home with my dog, I think we've played out the advantages I can get from chasing a stuffed squirrel around the house. (Although she always thinks all my ideas are brilliant!) 

Lines Between Work and Social (Media) Are Blurred

There are several dimensions to the question of privacy and how it plays into trends in human resources, but the one I want to talk about here is what I call the “always there” trend. The trend itself is not all that new. Since the invention of email and laptops employees and managers have felt an increasing obligation to always be available for work: Nothing new there. The new part comes when you start to look at the opposite side of the equation:

How much does our “social life” blur with our work life?

The huge rise in social media has lead to the situation where an increasing number of us are “always there” for our friends and family who want to Tweet Us, Friend Us, Tube Us, Plus Us or whatever else may be the latest social media trend. We are connected to social media the entire waking day (and some don’t seem to sleep much either). http://www.briansolis.com/2010/02/time-spent-on-social-networks-up-82-around-the-wrold/ . While a lot has been written about how the lines have blurred between work and home, very little has been said about the fact that the reverse is now truer than ever: The lines between home (our social media connections) and work have blurred. Keeping track of the kids, catching up with old school mates, seeing what past colleagues are doing – it’s all in a day’s work.

With this blurring of lines – where lies the distinction between what employers should know about your “social media life” and what belongs only to you? Do companies have a right to assess some aspects of an employee’s social network “footprint” when they are conducting a pre employment screening for instance? Can employees make the case that they should be allowed to have access to Facebook, Linked In, YouTube etc. but companies don’t have the right to know what they are doing on these sites?

Let me be clear. I am a strong believer that companies don’t need to meddle in the personal life of their employees. They should focus on things like performance, productivity, and effectiveness, and leave the personal stuff alone.  But I also believe that what we do in this new world enabled by social media has a great deal of relevance to who we are as employees.

The digital “footprint” we leave says a lot about who we are.

If you believe a person’s previous employment, hobbies, outside activities, volunteerism are all areas that impact how well a person will fit into your organization, then why not also assess what they do on social media? I, for one, hope companies do look at my social media profile. I think it only helps define who I am.

I am no longer defined by my job – I am defined by my Linked In profile – so get on board and tweet me!

Nine Months In Jail

I have a friend, a fellow that I used to work with. He just got out of jail. It all started with drinking. Most of these stories do. He was an IT director, very successful, had a wife, one young son, nice house. But he and his wife drank a lot. I never knew they did, it did not show up in his work. He hid it well. But things got worse for him over the years.

He lost his job, got a DUI or two, and violated his restraining order one too many times. They put him in jail.

Now he needs a job.

Would you hire him?

This is a guy with a lot of great technical skills in an economy where there is high demand for those skills. But he has an arrest record. That is challenge enough. But I learned something else about his struggle to find a job: he can’t get there. Or at least he can’t get to a lot of places.

I had breakfast with this friend of mine the other day. He was excited to announce that he had finally been offered a job. The interview went well. They questioned why a guy with so much experience and background would want this lower level position, but they also understood that someone with his past history needed to start over. Job offered, job accepted.

Then they told him the job started at 7:00 AM.

The buss that he has to rely on to get from where he lives to where he wants to work can’t get him there in time. When you have a DUI you lose your license. When you are in jail you can’t take the mandatory courses to gain it back.

I said I would drive him for the first two weeks.  

Thoughts for Thanksgiving

“Thanksgiving was never meant to be shut up in a single day.” –Robert Caspar Lintner

“Stand up, on this Thanksgiving Day, stand upon your feet. Believe in man. Soberly and with clear eyes, believe in your own time and place. There is not, and there never has been a better time, or a better place to live in.” –Phillips Brooks

Not what we say about our blessings, but how we use them, is the true measure of our thanksgiving.~ W. T. Purkiser

“A thankful heart is not only the greatest virtue, but the parent of all the other virtues.” –Cicero

“Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.”
—Melody Beattie

“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.” –John F. Kennedy

Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.― Ralph Waldo Emerson

What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal. ~Albert Pine

Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around. ~ Leo F. Buscaglia

And - A little Thanksgiving Humor...

“Thanksgiving, when the Indians said, “Well, this has been fun, but we know you have a long voyage back to England”. –Jay Leno

  

 “I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land.” –Jon Stewart

Vote HR: It Is All About Responsibility

We are all sick and tired of the political advertisements, the robo-calls (that’s one technology I wish they’d zap with a ray-gun), the mud-slinging and the unseemly pandering. But at the end of the day none of that matters – what matters is that we make democracy work by exercising our personal responsibility to:

GO VOTE

I saw a great political cartoon in the local paper today (I live in Fort Collins, Colorado – so LOCAL really means local. I think the vote for Homecoming King got equal billing this morning) but anyway the cartoon basically went like this: In the first panel it showed the White House and said “The site of the second most powerful person in the nation” and the second panel showed a polling booth with a person in it and said “The site of the first most powerful person in the nation.”

I also woke up to the inspiring stories on the news about people standing in lines in New York, New Jersey and other areas affected by Hurricane Sandy to go vote. Many of these people lost their homes, have no heat, have ruined basements, or cars without gas. But they took the time to vote!

As people who work, innovate and explore the issues of Human Resources, we have a special duty to show how important it is to meet our responsibilities. And today that responsibility is to get out and vote! Voting is all about responsibility and voting is the responsibility we all accepted when we decided to be part of a democracy. There really is no difference between the responsibility as a citizen to vote and the responsibility as an employee to do our job.

Today – our job is to vote.

I’m Jerry Thurber and I approve this message

Social Media Blurs Life/Work

There are several dimensions to the question of privacy and how it plays into our work-life (and I may talk about more of them in future blog posts) but here I want to address the issue of what I call the “always there” trend. The trend itself is not all that new. Since the invention of email and laptops employees and managers have felt an increasing obligation to always be available for work: Nothing new there. The new part comes when you start to look at the opposite side of the equation. How much does our “social life” blur with our work life? The huge rise in social media has lead to the situation where an increasing number of us are “always there” for our friends and family who want to Tweet Us, Friend Us, Tube Us or whatever else may be the latest social media trend. We are connected to social media the entire waking day (and some don’t seem to sleep much either). While a lot has been written about how the lines have blurred between work and home, very little has been said about the fact that the reverse is now truer than ever: the lines between home (our social media connections) and work have blurred. Keeping track of the kids, catching up with old school mates, seeing what past colleagues are doing – it’s all in a day’s work.

With this blurring of lines – where lies the distinction between what employers should know about your “social media life” and what belongs only to you? Do companies have a right to assess some aspects of an employee’s social network “footprint” when they are conducting a pre employment screening or an employee background check? Can employees make the case that they should be allowed to have access to Facebook, Linked In, YouTube etc. but companies don’t have the right to know what they are doing on these sites? Let me be clear – I am a strong believer that companies don’t need to meddle in the personal life of their employees – they should focus on things like performance, productivity, and effectiveness, and leave the personal stuff alone.  But I also believe that what we do in this new world enabled by social media (by the way, I hate that term, since social media is so much more than social) has a great deal of relevance to who we are as employees. The digital “footprint” we leave says a lot about who we are. If you believe a person’s previous employment, hobbies, outside activities, volunteerism are all areas that impact how well a person will fit into your organization, then why not also assess what they do on social media. I, for one, hope companies do look at my social media profile. I think it only helps define who I am. Human Resources needs to get on board with the social media trend and find ways that protect privacy, while also finding ways to add value social media data. I am no longer defined by my job – I am defined by my Linked In profile – so get on board and tweet me!