justplainbil

Just Plain Bill

Collaboration – valued but elusive

Several years ago, back when Yahoo! was still viable (and Marissa Mayer was fairly new as its CEO), the company made the decision to eliminate all work-from-home employees. The rationale for this change of policy was to encourage “collaboration” that would supposedly result from working face-to-face.

When this policy change took place over four years ago, I wrote a satirical post entitled “Thank you, Melissa Mayer”, for assuming just because employees work in close proximity to their colleagues that collaboration would result. Mayer stated, “We need to be One Yahoo! and that starts with physically being together." Not that this one policy change led to Yahoo’s demise, but I’m sure it didn’t help with workplace morale. It’s been a well-accepted tradition for engineers to work remotely, and it was projected that a majority of Yahoo’s engineers would look for work elsewhere since the majority of them were working more than two hours away from the Yahoo! facility.

Collaboration is a desired dynamic in the workplace, with many proven benefits from the synergy resulting from collective contributions. But collaboration does not occur just because employees work in close proximity. Especially with the technology tools available to us today, collaboration can just as easily result from a viable group of workers whose temperament, or preference, is to work alone, but as individual contributors to shared goals and achievements.

In my experience, a manager should not assume all employees work in the same way, or try to treat all workers the same. Knowing the tendencies, strengths, and skillsets of all employees is one of the hallmarks of a successful manager. Numerous scholars have supported this challenging concept, that to do anything less is a formula for ignoring the contributions of all employees.

What do you think? Have you been a meaningful collaborator who was allowed to work remotely?  

Let’s collaborate.