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Monday, March 4, 2013
Marissa Mayer - My Sheroe
MARISSA MAYER – MY SHEROE
 |
| Elle Terry |
So at zero dark
thirty this morning, I was greeted with an email from LinkedIn and a headline
story from BusinessInsider
on what led Marissa Mayer to call in
her “work at home” employees. I find
out that Ms. Mayer did her homework and ran the numbers. The Yahoo! VPN (Virtual Private
Network) showed that folks were at home slacking. Not enough log-ins to justify being at home.
The media has slammed
Ms. Mayer for having the audacity, yeah, the audacity, to recall Yahoo!’s
teleworkers and make them come into the office. The reasons why run from “more face time is needed” to “creativity
flows better” when everybody is in the office. Working from home, while it has its perks, is only really
effective at this point in Internet history, when it is based on Pay for
Performance (PFP), i.e., you only get paid when you produce.
I work from home on a
PFP basis and the temptation is always there to do the housework, take the
phone calls, and talk to the mailman when you are supposed to be working, but I don't get paid if I don't work. The (corporate) systems are not totally in place
yet to monitor (fully) teleworkers though. What Mayer did was to check the number of log-ins teleworkers
made during a particular time period and saw that there were far fewer log-ins,
and maybe, just maybe a probable reason why Yahoo! is not No.#1.
As a leader, you have
a variety of choices and decisions to make on a daily basis. Sometimes those decisions and choices
look mean and fast to the outside world, but what Ms. Mayer is doing is “regrouping”. I do not think that this will be a
permanent situation for Yahoo!’s teleworkers, but I believe that a broader
message is being sent – you can’t get away with minimal, mediocre work just
because you are working from home.
Regardless of
whatever the media is saying about “stay at home moms” and all the rest, at the
end of the day, Yahoo! is a business, Ms. Mayer their leader and she made the
call. For those of you who want to
lambast Mayer for making the decision to bring teleworkers back to the office
while she has a nursery built, know this.
She worked hard to get to that place of having a nursery built next to
her office. She has a Bachelors in
Symbolic Systems and graduated with honors from Stanford, and she has a Masters in Computer Science. I won’t even mention the honorary
doctorate she received. When and
if you get this far in your academic journey, you can ponder a nursery, car and
other perks. She did not just walk
in off the street and take over.
She worked hard....and I bet she knows what she’s doing when it comes to
employees....do I need to remind you that she used to run Google? Yeah, that
search engine you can’t live without has Marissa Mayer’s imprint all over it. Quit rushing to judgment and let’s see
how this plays out. e/.
Read more about the situation at Business Insider
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