You will have heard that the Bar portion of this week's FUBar has been moved to the Honest Lawyer (start time 5:30, right, Igor?). So, we have a topic that lawyers, HR consultants, economists and Joe and Jane Professional can all get their teeth into: Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer's recently leaked memo forbidding all Yahoos (that's really what they're called) from working from home.
A first and obvious response, given Yahoo's recent history, is that if they've done something then it must be a bad idea. However, anyone who has been chair of an academic department in the last 20 years knows things are not so simple. Academics and other professionals are surely engaged in team production a-la-Holmstrom, and there is a defensible view that working from home deprives one's colleagues of positive (yes - and some negative) externalities. Indeed, this view is captured pretty cogently in the second paragraph of the Yahoo memo that is reprinted in the first attached reading. That view is also what fuels the mostly favourable analysis of Mayer's memo in the second reading. However, the third reading is from a NYTimes 'Debate' on this issue, in which a mgmt prof sides with Mayer, citing a number of positive aspects of working in a structured office environment, two mgmt gurus disagree and argue for 'managing the work and not the people', and economist Nick Bloom suggests that he personally loves working from home, offers up the results of an experiment on it that he oversaw - but does not mention what his colleagues think of his work habits.
One place you certainly can't telecommute to is the Honest Lawyer: see you @ the FUBar.
