Monday Moaning

Sometimes corporations and companies make illogical decisions.

We are in a time of crisis, global everything is screwed up almost beyond redemption.

The environment as well as finances are well up the creek and we have no paddles.

Austerity and belt tightening are being felt everywhere.

We are fighting our carbon footprint, trying to reduce it and then along comes some quack pot CEO and makes a decision to add 11,500 more workers to the daily commute.

Talk about a silly bitch.

She wants them at their desks, round the water coolers, swiping their entry passes, day in, day out. Not for her, and no longer for them, the option of working from home – and to hell with the environmental fight. So she no longer wants employees working from home.

I am talking about Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer.

Alexandra Shulman on working from home: it’s not an adequate alternative

Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer caused a stir this week when she banned staff from working at home. British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman explains why she agrees with her

‘I believe in the collective creativity of an office’ … Alexandra Shulman, editor of British Vogue, in her London office.

 

It doesn’t seem right, does it? Marissa Mayer, a woman who has succeeded where so many women have not yet, in reaching the top of one of the world’s most important technology companies, has let us down. This week, she ordered that the 11,500 Yahoo employees in the US should work in the office or leave the company. She wants them at their desks, round the water coolers, swiping their entry passes, day in, day out. Not for her, and no longer for them, the option of working from home.

The fact that Mayer – not just a woman, but a young woman with a small child – has nixed the rights of her employees to take advantage of the arguably more child-friendly and independent option of working outside the office has disappointed many. It may be a way to reduce the substantial staff numbers at Yahoo, but that is not the issue. The issue is that nowadays we have come to believe that working at home is a completely adequate alternative to showing our face in the office.

But it’s not. Working from home is exactly that. Working in the office is something different. At Vogue, there have been many occasions when a member of the team has suggested to me that it would be incredibly helpful for them if I would consider them working from home for part of the week. We wouldn’t notice the difference, they often say. The rest of their department are happy to make this work. They would be on their mobile and email all day (a notion that always makes me think of some strange person wired into electrical sockets from their bed). Honestly, they would get far more done.

Invariably my reaction is the same. Sorry, but no. This is not born out of some stubborn recalcitrance where I believe that you are only productive if you are seated at a desk in my sightline (far from it – I am always urging people to get out and about), but because I believe in the collective creativity of an office. Some of the best stories in any publication I have worked on have come out of a glancing remark somebody has made about their night before, or a piece of gossip, or a joke. The daily download of chatter within the office feeds into what we produce in an incalculable way. Having half the team sitting at home, fiddling around on a search engine from the kitchen or pasting up mood boards from the sofa does not replicate that.

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Opinion:

Both these women are crazy.

At the very time we should be encouraging more people to work from home for the benefit of the environment, they are thumbing their noses at the increase in global carbon footprint or the possibility of reducing it.

More people working from home reduces the load on commuter systems, reduces the need for the number of watercoolers whose manufacture needlessly uses resources, reduces the amount of office space needed. In fact the more who work from home reduces everything; and all these reductions are beneficial to the planet.