HOW WELL DOES WORKING FROM HOME WORK? from Feroz Ali's blog

Almost everyone seems to have an opinion about whether Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer was wise or otherwise when she decided to end permanent telecommuting arrangements at her company.

I don't. This may be a little surprising, since I write a regular opinion column. My regular readers have probably concluded that I have opinions, worthwhile or not, about everything.

Editorialists, journalists and bloggers all rushed to comment on the policy change. Some argued that working from home is productive, and accused Mayer of missing or ignoring the drawbacks of working in an office. Others defended Mayer, pointing out that her decision was simply about what was best for Yahoo, not a broader statement about the utility of working from home. Still others tied the news into the ongoing discussion about women trying to climb the corporate ladder and raise young children simultaneously, while others polled the public to see whether they thought working from home made employees more or less effective.

Readers keeping up with the coverage would be forgiven for suspecting reactions to Yahoo's policy say more about their respective authors than about Yahoo.

People tend to assume, falsely, that their experiences and priorities are always relevant to somebody else's situation. Running my own business gives me quite enough to do without worrying about how Mayer runs her company. Lacking an insider's perspective, I cannot form a knowledgeable opinion about whether I would have reached the same decision in Mayer's position. All I can do is reflect on my own experiences, apply my own values and priorities, and wonder whether lack of productivity is really at the core of Yahoo's problems.

Employees at my company, starting with me as its founder, have always worked from home on occasion. In some cases, employees have split their workweek between  work from home employee monitoting and office for extended periods of time; in a few situations, they have worked almost exclusively from home for temporary periods of up to a year.

Telecommuting plays an important, though limited, role at our company. Our organization would not be nearly as strong without it. Yet what works for us would not necessarily work for other businesses in our own industry, let alone in fields that are very different from the tax and financial planning services we provide. Some firms probably need to allow more telecommuting than we do, while others should do it less.

The debate over the "productivity" of work-from-home employees largely misses the point, for two reasons. The first is that working from home probably increases productivity sometimes and reduces it at other times, in different amounts for different employees. The second is that productivity - the number of units of "work," however we define it, that an employee churns out in a given period of time or for a given amount of compensation - may not be the most important consideration in evaluating an employee's performance or overall value to the company. It might not even be close.

There is almost no circumstance in which I would hire a new employee and have that person start by working from home most or all of the time. The need to evaluate a new employee's work habits and ability to self-supervise is part of the reason, but only a minor part. Even if I had the utmost faith in the employee's diligence and focus, we want to provide as much guidance and mentoring as possible during the first few years an employee is with us. At the same time, we want to integrate that person into our tightly knit, team-oriented, client-centric culture.