Working Virtually? Yahoo!

This week, Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo decreed that all her employees would begin working from the office later this year, and that the work from home experiment was over and that it wasn’t working out too well for Yahoo. Interesting, but I’m not sure it’s really the news story that it’s become. A CEO made a decision for her company that she feels is the right thing to do. Good for her. Who cares?  I don’t get why it’s such big news.

Marissa, all smiles...Before the entire world decided to voice their opinion

But it has made me think of my own work-from-home experience. In the past 15 years, I’ve gone through many phases of virtual work. I don’t love working from home. It’s not my thing. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the flexibility, but the thought of getting up every morning and retreating to the basement isn’t exactly awe-inspiring. Let’s just say that on a couple of occasions, one as recent as last week, 4pm arrived, I was still in my lounge-wear (read: pajamas) and I wasn’t at all sure whether I had brushed my teeth that day. The experience doesn’t motivate me.

In my early work from home days I spent a lot of time on the phone with my colleagues in the US and the UK. Lots of conference calls. Listen, conference calls are not my favourite thing on my best day, so add to that the inherent distractions of your own home. I have the attention span of a gnat, so I’m not exactly an engaged conference call participant when conditions are optimal. Now imagine me, cordless phone propped between my ear and my shoulder, trying to participate while taking out the garbage. Some people just shouldn’t work from home. In addition to finding my own ways to distract myself while on conference calls at home, my lovely daughters absolutely loved to pick up the extension and introduce themselves to my ‘friends’ in the UK and the US. That’s cute the first time. Mildly humourous the second time, and by the third time, career limiting. I now pay for a second line for my home office.

As my children have grown, they’ve become yellers. My lovely wife and my beautiful daughters communicate with each other at a volume that approaches that of a ZZ Top concert. If I’m working from home, I now make sure that there is no way that I am on a call at 3:30 when the masses arrive home from school, because I’m sure for the people on the other end, it sounds like I’ve just been invaded by North Korea. I now have a sign that I post up for all to see that says “I’m on the phone”. It doesn’t work. Turns out that screaming kids and howling dogs don’t take time to read.

Dogs don't read?  What?

We also had some operational challenges to overcome when I began to work at home. In the beginning, I’d be working, and Laura would call down to the basement to advise me that she was running out and that she’d be gone for a couple of hours. That left me in charge of the kids, who in those days, couldn’t really fend for themselves. Before I’d have a chance to object, I heard the minivan exit the driveway. On the bright side, I’ve had the benefit of a tremendous amount of 5-year old input into my strategic planning documents and sales presentations.

She also expected that I would be responsible for some daytime chores, like laundry. It was bad enough that my desk was jammed in a dark corner adjacent to the laundry room, which has no door, and I had to deal with the sounds of the laundry all day, but now there was an expectation that I was going to become an active participant in the process as well. I got so frustrated that I did what any normal work from home dad would do…I outsourced. I found somebody that would pick up five laundry bags from us every week (one for each of us), wash, fold, put it back in the bag it came out of, and return it to us the next day. The best $50.00 a week I ever spent. That went on for almost one blissful-laundry free year. I don’t know what happened, but it ended. I think I went back to work in the office.

Outsourcing the laundry.  It's a good thing.

In the course of my working from home career, Laura has gone from one end of the spectrum, where I’ve been an additional set of hands to help her, to the opposite end of the same spectrum where I simply don’t exist, and as such, she doesn’t offer to make me lunch or even tell me when she’s coming and going. The pendulum has now settled somewhere in the middle, and it’s working great. We even go out for lunch together sometimes. I’m still not wild about the idea of working from home everyday. I need the office, and the contact with the folks I work with. I think, though, that sometimes the office wishes I would just work from home.