Editor’s note: This article was first published in July 2013, a few months after Marissa Mayer ended remote work at Yahoo. The remote-work debate has changed a lot since the 2020 pandemic.
A few months ago Marissa Mayer put an end to remote work at Yahoo, and since then all sorts of debates have sprung up. On one side are those who, like Ms Mayer, believe that having a team physically close together can be far more efficient and creative; on the other are those who think the Yahoo CEO’s decision is counterproductive.
Amid the doubts about the pros and cons of working from home, Citrix, a company that designs technology so that employees can work remotely, has carried out a study on the question.
Among the reasons that led Marissa Mayer to require all her employees to show up at the office in person and to ban remote work was the CEO’s distrust of her workers: she believed they could slip into apathy and carelessness, on top of causing a loss of shared creativity.
The Citrix survey gathered very positive comments from people who work from home, some of whom said they made great progress when working from home. Many of them listed advantages such as better focus, greater creativity, time saved by not commuting, and feeling relaxed, comfortable and free of distractions.
(Read: 8 tips for starting a business from home)
As a conclusion of the study, we could say that people who work from home tend to feel more positive and make more progress in less time. While it’s true that not everyone likes the idea of working from home, it’s also true that those who do feel more fulfilled, because they can plan their work around their life and not the other way round, as happens with working on site.
Add to this a study by Stanford, in which employees of a Chinese telemarketing company were chosen at random to work from home, and you could see that the salespeople who worked from home got better results and were more productive.
But there’s a catch in these studies.
The studies showing the advantages of working from home were based on independent and repetitive jobs that obviously didn’t require going to a physical office. There was no need to collaborate with other people, and it wasn’t work that involved sharing ideas with the rest of the company.
In other words, not every job can be done from home, and in roles built on shared creativity you need to be physically in the office to share and debate ideas together. If teamwork is needed, remote work isn’t an option.
Conclusion: face-to-face contact is still necessary for roles that require group creativity or teamwork, while many other jobs can bring an improvement in the quality of life of the person working remotely, as well as savings in money and time for both the company and the employee.
See also: 7 people who succeeded working from home
Featured image: Coolcaesar at the English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
