The tech world doesn't want people working from home. Or so it seems.
Hewlett Packard, which had previously encouraged many employees to work from home, is now nudging them back into the office. And after Yahoo and Best Buy made moves to discourage working from home, the tech press and pundits are convinced they've spotted a bona fide trend.
But what’s going on here is far more nuanced than a full-scale retreat from remote work -- and much more encouraging for home workers. Ubiquitous broadband and cloud computing helped usher in the euphoric first wave of 21st century work-from-home arrangements, in which employers salivated over real estate cost savings and workers fantasized about nuking commutes and pointless meetings. Now, we’re in the second wave, a reckoning with the realities of telecommuting that could make the practice more productive for companies and more satisfying for employees, and thus more popular and available.
Take HP. Yes, the company is encouraging a return to the office, writing in a memo obtained by All Things D that "HP needs all hands on deck...to build a stronger culture of engagement and collaboration."
But consider the context: Just a few years ago, the company was all but shoving some employees out of the offices -- by HP’s own admission. To cut HP’s real estate holdings and reduce costs, former CEO Mark Hurd cut back on physical space, installed flexible office technology and encouraged telecommuting. Expecting a 70-year-old company with a longstanding office culture to maintain its collaborative strengths as its workers were suddenly sent home and set adrift amid spending cuts was not a viable strategy. So HP is, as it explained to the New York Times, making space for people who want to come back into the office, while leaving the old work-from-home policies firmly in place.
Yahoo and Best Buy have also bent over backwards to make it clear that their own moves to get people back into the office are attempts to create work arrangements that function better over the long term. Under a series of short-term, underperfoming CEOs, Yahoo had reportedly seen its work-from-home system devolve into an escape from dysfunction at the office, with some employees avoiding doing any work at all or even launching their own startups.
CEO Marrissa Mayer has said that by the time she arrived on the scene, employees complained that work-from-home arrangements kept teams from gelling, so workers were recalled to headquarters. But she left the door open for bringing back remote work once the company is back on its feet, saying remote work is “not right for us — right now.”
It’s possible to build a culture of remote work that allows employees to be more focused, commute hours to be made productive, and managers to clearly shape and see the results. But that requires a healthfully focused company and certain degrees of savvy, engagement, and practice on the part of both managers and workers. Too often, the potential of working from home is spoiled by broader dysfunction, under-engaged managers or employees who lose their motivation, perhaps out of habit, once they’re outside the walls of headquarters. For all its potential benefits, telecommuting is a tough problem involving technical, cultural, and tactical challenges. What’s surprising isn’t how often it fails, but that people are still trying -- hard -- to make it work.
