At the beginning of this chapter you read about the operational philosophy of the Cheesecake Factory. Using the information presented in this chapter, you should now be able to answer these questions.

Early in 2013, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer made the controversial decision to ban employees from working exclusively at home. Her action seemed to run in the face of a years-long trend in the opposite direction by her company and other businesses across many industries. The question, then, that faces many organizations (and employees) is the following: Is telecommuting really beneficial? And if so, who reaps those benefits? Certainly today’s information technologies provide telecommuting possibilities on a larger scale than ever before. Yahoo, like many other firms, has an internal Virtual Private Network, into which thousands of employees can log in at remote locations for conducting company business. Mayer’s decision suggested that disadvantages outweighed advantages for her company at that time.¹⁸

And yet, more U.S. employees are working remotely than ever before. For example, a Gallup poll in 2016 indicated that 43 percent of employees were working from home at least part of the time, up from 39 percent in 2012. Because those numbers are growing, the future stakes for businesses and employees will depend even more on decisions about home-based versus office-based employment.¹⁹

Advocates for telecommuting cite its benefits. A Stanford study indicates a 13 percent productivity increase for call center employees working at home. It also cites greater work satisfaction and less employee turnover. Other studies report home-based employees work up to seven hours longer in their workweek than do those working at the office, have greater productivity, and less absenteeism. At-home employees note that they don’t get distracted by co-workers, they avoid unnecessary commute time, take breaks when they prefer, and have a better quality of life, among other benefits.²⁰

Critics, in contrast, note telecommuting’s downside. Some people simply don’t like to work alone. Others are not as productive working alone because better ideas and problem solutions are more forthcoming through face-to-face interactions and being physically nearby for work-related discussions. Also cited are advantages of separating home and workplace, avoiding the many distractions at home, and claims that telecommuting is widely abused. Employers report that having at least some scheduled on-site work time, even if not full-time, provides better performance, including problem solutions for customer service.

Mayer concluded that Yahoo’s quality and productivity were at unacceptable levels because of too many employees working exclusively at home. She is reported to favor working at the office, citing benefits of gaining information and ideas from meeting new people, spontaneous conversations in the hallways, and quick accessibility to other face-to-face interactions for solving problems. “Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home.” Accordingly, Mayer suspected that Yahoo’s telecommuting may be less productive than it should be. Rather than relying on mere suspicions, she wanted some factual basis, preferably backed up by data. So, she turned to Yahoo’s Virtual Private Network and looked at the data files showing frequencies of employees’ log-ins. She concluded that they were not checking in enough, thus indicating too much inactivity and too little productivity.²¹

Does face-to-face contact among employees really affect quality and productivity? A study of workers in call-center teams at Bank of America found that, yes, it does matter. Productivity was found to be greatest for workers in close-knit teams where workers mingled more frequently, rather than when working alone. Collaboration and spontaneous information sharing seemed to enhance productivity. But what about in other jobs where workers face different kinds of tasks, some more complex and others much simpler? Does either the office setting or the telecommuting setting, in general, always provide more promise for better productivity and quality? The answer is more likely to be situational rather than “one size fits all.”²²