The last essay, about the use of Web searching by persons attempting to diagnose their own maladies, focused on one of the many ways modern technology has changed our lives. Of much greater importance, in the daily routines of some, is the option of telecommuting.
The idea of being able to work from home has tremendous appeal. Although in my specialty of emergency medicine it really isn't an option, because there are so many reasons we are "hospital based," in decades past some doctors had their offices in their homes. My first eye doctor was one of them. But there were still direct personal connections being made between the doctor and his patients and among the office staff.
Nowadays, though, there are many kinds of jobs in which the connections can be made electronically. We do so much of our work on computers, and when we communicate about that work with our associates, much of that can be done electronically, too. Imagine an engineer whose work focuses on design or sales. Most of the work is done on a computer, and most of the communication with customers and colleagues is by phone or e-mail. Often that can be done as readily from home, where the computer and the telephone work quite nicely.
Some people who do this kind of work in an office may adjust their hours, perhaps arriving earlier or leaving later than others. Road traffic may be part of the motivation, but often it's because those different hours at the beginning or the end of the day are times when one can be most productive because of the lack of interruptions. So imagine how interruption-free your day could be if you have no children or they are in school, and your spouse (if you have one) is either not home or respects your privacy in a home office.
The key to a job suitable for telecommuting is usually a computer. And so it is not at all surprising that a company like Yahoo would have many employees who work from home quite a bit. What is surprising, however, is that Yahoo's CEO, Marissa Mayer, has declared an end to this. Yahoo employees who telecommute are being pulled back into the office - or dismissed. If you didn't know who she was, you could be forgiven for thinking she must have come to Yahoo from some company in a traditional manufacturing business.
Nope. It was Google. She spent 13 years with Google before becoming, at the age of 37, the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company when she moved over to Yahoo last summer.
The news reports say this is all about productivity, and the experts discussing this, during the sort of in-depth programming one finds on NPR, cite studies that show most people are more productive when they work in an office at the company, even if it's work that could be done at home. And it isn't just a matter of self-discipline or time management, although those are contributing factors. No, they tell us, it's the opportunity to interact with colleagues face to face, whether it's in formal meetings or just wandering over to each other's cubicles from time to time.
My work involves a great deal of personal interaction. Doctors interact very directly with patients, nurses, and each other. It would be difficult for me to teach students and residents, tomorrow's practitioners of my specialty, remotely, even with the advanced video technology now available.
But what about in these other professions? How important are those direct encounters? The experts say phone calls and e-mails are less effective forms of communication because of the loss of intonation, inflection, and non-verbal cues, deficiencies incompletely addressed with videoconferencing. I am inclined to agree with them about that, because a year ago I participated in a board meeting by video link after winter storms made it impossible for me to get from Pennsylvania to Texas. It just wasn't the same. I was not a full participant.
I cannot help wondering, though, whether Mayer's directive is the right answer. Are those face-to-face encounters so important that we must have them every working day? Couldn't Tuesday and Thursday, for example, be enough? Perhaps Yahoo will make this big move and then ease into some level of compromise.
The concern about direct personal interactions seems to me to be chiefly qualitative. But there are likely some solid quantitative data, too. Some kinds of productivity do lend themselves to metrics. If you are assembling widgets (my favorite word for some item that is ill-defined and is to remain unspecified), we can easily measure how many of them come off the line per unit time. Productivity metrics in the kinds of work people do on computers, from home, are more elusive.
Further, it is intuitively obvious that there is tremendous individual variation. Undoubtedly some people have a work style that would cause them to get nothing done if they tried to do it at home, because there are just too many distractions. Even if it would never cross your mind to turn on a television, if you get the impulse to surf the Web, there's no one around to notice. The refrigerator is right there. You can have a beverage or a snack whenever you like, which is not the case in very many offices. A dog appears in front of you holding a leash in his mouth. A cat rubs up against you, informing you of a desire to have your undivided attention for a minute or two. You could brew another pot of coffee, but you cannot help wondering what your work flow might be like if you had a pint of ale instead.
When I'm writing, I need absolute concentration. Interruptions are most unwelcome. I think it would not go well if I tried to do it in a cubicle with other people around, people who might wander over to talk to me about something, at any moment, unannounced. In my day job, which this isn't, every hour of every day is a constant stream of interruptions. That's just the nature of the work. Learning how to cope with that and not allow it to cause errors is a lifelong endeavor, and few achieve complete mastery. There is an occasional moment when I want to ask a coworker, "Do you realize that you just interrupted someone who interrupted me while I was talking to someone who interrupted a train of thought that is now hopelessly derailed?" But I don't. I just smile, because that's never going to change. It can't. I simply have to manage it.
The point is that, for some kinds of work, my productivity would be so much greater if I stayed home, because the work environment there is conducive. And that's without taking into account all the extra time spent getting to and from work. Oh, and don't forget the time one must spend working to earn the money to pay transportation expenses. I realize the employer may not care about that, but it's all part of the calculus.
Last spring an engineer missed the last step or two on her way down to the kitchen late at night. The consequent injury made it impossible for her to go into the office for a couple of months. I happen to be married to her, so I had ample opportunity to make observations of her adaptation to working from home. I'm pretty sure her productivity was unchanged or better during that time.
It is my suspicion that Mayer is on the wrong track here. But then, so is Yahoo, which has had four different people in the CEO job in the last 18 months and has seen its sales slumping badly in the last few years. If Mayer can turn the company around, she'll get much credit and impress many people. Probably little if any of such a turnaround will be related to improved productivity. But it is safe to say that if the company doesn't recover from its doldrums, the end of the era of Yahoo employees being able to work from home will be perceived as just another dumb idea.
The CEO had her first child last fall. She told a reporter for Fortune magazine, paraphrasing Vince Lombardi, that her priorities were "God, family, and Yahoo" - in that order. (Lombardi's trinity included the Green Bay Packers.) Given that sensible ordering of priorities, I suspect she will have reason to work from home quite a few days during her son's infancy and toddlerhood.
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