March 7, 2013 Canceling Telecommuting Is A Path To Downsizing

Yahoo! and Best Buy recently shook up the professional world by canceling and putting an end to telecommuting options for their corporate employees. This was a bigger announcement for Yahoo! since they hired people that would only be remote employees and not have an office location to go to. Best Buy stopped their ROWE (Results Only Work Environment) which was a little different as this was you could work when you wanted to but not necessarily only telecommuting. Either way this was a huge shake up in thinking and made the rest of the country take a step back 20 years and re-look at their practices.

Originally I was looking at this move as a crackdown on under performing employees, lower quality of results, and loss of control of the people. Ultimately I kept circling back to the mentality that if this was the case then Yahoo! and Best Buy have really poor management practices if they can't handle this. I personally am 100% for remote working. As I was talking to various people about this headline, this afternoon I talked with a retired executive level and he gave me a different viewpoint.

Yahoo! and Best Buy did this to get rid of people without laying them off.

Think about it, you have two failing (declining) companies of massive size. You need to make cuts but when you do that you have to spend more money to pay severances, bonuses, sick time, etc... out to the laid off employees. Instead make a massive culture shift that doesn't change the jobs of the people but how they are used to doing their work and make them quit on their own. When people leave voluntarily, no severances have to be paid.

This is a simplistic explanation from how it was laid out to me but it makes sense. Really by pissing off 20-30% of your remote people by making them come in and altering years of routine and comfort, you are going to have people leave. Say 5% decide to go, sure you will lose some talent, but you will save money. Being an executive in a company that had problems he went on to explain that this is a more common practice than people want to admit.

If people quit, Yahoo! and Best Buy trim down without trimming down, and a year or two from now they 'reintroduce' remote working and not have to re-hire to backfill. Money saved, processes streamlined, company lives on for a few more days.

If people don't quit, forced layoffs are coming for both of these guys anyway.

End of Line.
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