In light of the recent headlines created by Yahoo!, I
thought it would be best to take a step back and review certain aspects of how
one views their daily work. Working from
home is nothing new. The nomadic sales
person has been doing it for centuries.
Add to that the daily contractor that is on job sites by day and
crunching numbers by night or the home-based business person selling everything
from cosmetics to jewelry, the home office is nothing new.
What is new, are the personalities and tools that have found
their way into the home office/telecommuting environment. One must have a sense of his/her own personal
discipline and work in an environment conducive to their needs. Sales people of all personalities have found
ways to prosper. However, now we have a
rise in a relatively new animal known as the consultant. Consultants are found in every field and most
are not accustomed to being their own boss or the freedom, for better or worse,
that comes with working from home.
For many, this has been modified to give them the best of
both worlds; the tether to a corporate office or employer with the freedom of
working from home. That being said, if
the personality of the telecommuter is not conducive to an at home work
environment, then the work and the company suffers. What Yahoo! did could be in reaction to the
wrong personalities working outside the office environment. So the approach is to bring everyone back to
the company office, evaluate personalities, possibly create training
initiatives to help all personalities work better off site, then open the
company back up to telecommuting.
It only makes sense that with so many tools at ones disposal
that overcoming any personality or complementing personalities should be
possible. But without understanding how
to make maximum use of the tools, they go underutilized. I could load up my truck with all kinds of
tools from Home Depot but without the knowledge of how to use them, I can’t
make, build, or fix anything.
In conclusion, the issue boils down to the need for
evaluation and training. Perhaps other
firms need to do the same thing as Yahoo! and maybe some firms have already
found solutions to create a “best practices” training approach to the
issue. Either way, it is easy to poke
fun at an internet based firm doing away with telecommuting. But there is always more to the story than
just the headline or late night joke.
