Modern means of communication have almost realized the age-old dream of working people. If you do not need to stand at the machine, then there is not much point in coming to work: you can perform all official duties from home. Is it good?
In early 2013, Yahoo, the largest Internet company, unexpectedly informed its employees that free visits and the ability to work from home, which had long been practiced at Yahoo, were being canceled. All employees were required to visit the offices daily. The then vice president of the company, Jacqueline Rezes, insisted on making this decision. Soon she sent out a letter to all employees explaining the reason for this change. According to Rezes, being in the office encourages collaboration and communication among all team members, and many successful decisions “are born from conversations in the hallways and cafeterias” of the company.
The barrage of criticism that hit Yahoo is indescribable. The company was reproached for making blatantly conservative decisions, designed to serve progress, and at the same time for infringing on the rights of working mothers and for many other mortal sins.
- How to work effectively from home
Nevertheless, Yahoo has not gone around the world since then and is doing very well. Jacqueline Rezes, however, no longer works there — but only because she became a top manager in another large and successful structure. And most importantly, the words of Mrs. Rezes, which at the beginning of 2013 seemed almost heresy, suddenly found scientific confirmation.
It was discovered by psychologist Michael Pratt and business process manager Kevin Rockmann, who studied the organization of work in a large technology company.1. Its name is not given in the study, but it is known that the company is in the top 100 according to Fortune magazine, the number of its employees worldwide exceeds 100 thousand, and the practice of remote work has been used here for a long time and actively. The scientists conducted in-depth interviews with several hundred employees of the company. In which, among other things, they were also interested in the reasons that encourage employees to work from home.
- Why can’t we work at work?
Of course, among these reasons they mentioned significant savings in time and money on the way to the office and back, the opportunity to pay more attention to family and household chores, and other obvious things. But do you know what was the most important reason and was mentioned most often? “I don’t see the point in coming to the office, because I will almost certainly not meet any of my colleagues there.” And one of the employees formulated this idea even more extensively: “I really miss at least one day when I could come to the office, sit down with colleagues and discuss them and my affairs.”
Moreover, Michael Pratt and Kevin Rockmann emphasize that this trend is reproducing itself, «infecting» even those who initially did not intend to work from home. Unable to meet and receive positive incentives from communication with fellow employees, colleagues and even superiors, these employees also stop coming to the office. Thus, modern offices are increasingly turning into “gatherings of people who are not connected in any way and do not work together and in this sense are not particularly different from any coffee shop. With the only difference that the Internet in the office is still better. But coffee is probably worse, ”the authors of the article state sarcastically.
1 Kevin W. Rockmann, Michael G. Pratt «Contagious Offsite Work and the Lonely Office: The Unintended Consequences of Distributed Work». Online publication on the website of the Academy of Management Discoveries magazine from October 7, 2015.