The Yahoo! Effect

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.