Little did Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer know that she would be reawakening the national debate around work and life balance when she sent an email saying that, starting in June, employees at the tech giant would no longer be able to work from home.
“Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home,” she wrote. “We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.”
Interestingly enough, Yahoo’s new policy is counter to the work trends of many corporations, as Ellen Galinsky of the Families and Work Institute tells the Boston Globe. A 2012 study by the institute found that 63 percent of companies allowed some employees to occasionally work from home; a jump from 2005 when 34 percent of firms allowed that sort of flexibility. The research further shows that employees who work flex hours are “more productive than those forced into face time.”
In a perfect world we would all decide the hours we wanted to work. That world would also, I imagine, be more favorable to the needs of our family life. But, that doesn’t seem to be the world we’re living in at the moment. So, if you were really the boss of you, what kind of workweek would you choose? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.
[poll id=273146]