NASA engineers send remote controlled spacecraft into the black interstellar space.
Yahoo engineers are unable to program the code behind a "submit" button on a web page remotely -- or so you can interpret what was said by the leaders during the first couple of days of the great work from home dust up.
Faced with blowback against their non-arguments of greater speed and the benefits of shoulder rubbing for innovation, they eventually descended into VPN log slinging.
Many employees do not log in to the VPN when they are supposed to be working from home.
Yeah, busted!
Really?
We doubt that Yahoo would give us the details, but from our vast knowledge and experience, we bring you some un-nerving typicalities around working from home.
Logging in to the VPN may not be necessary
This is the big, ugly grey area. Company email is not tied to the VPN, everybody has a "web mail" for the express purpose of ease of use and flexibility. So, you can be sitting at home responding to 1 000 emails, and your boss could still excuse you of slacking because the VPN log has no entry for you.
If you work remotely one or two days a week and have a little bit of structure to your tasks, you may very well be able to do all the coding you need without using the VPN.
And if you run a company whose VPN needs an RSA key generator AND has a session timeout of 15 minutes: dumb.
Show me the slackers
The yahoos who work from home and NEVER log in to their VPN should be non-existent. If they exist, fire them. Not for slacking but for failing to make a tiny bit of an effort to pretend they give a hoot about the company.
Remote working as a reward
A nasty aspect of corporate reward and punishment is this: individuals are allowed to work from home as a reward for anything from good work, to seniority, to unwavering support for an asshole boss. Or individuals are punished by having their remote work canceled -- for any petty reason you can imagine.
Of course, neither the "yes, you can work remotely" nor the "we need you at the office" arguments will show the faintest hint of reward or punishment in their "because" clauses.
That would be illegal.
Everybody knows.
It is one of these marvelous instants in human life when communication
is achieved without the reasons being spelled out.
People are people
That means that some people are really bad at motivating themselves to crawl out of bed. Please, all you managers who read this, give those people a goal in life: the office.
Some people are more productive without the office life around them, happier.
The problem with that: these folks may not know it until they have spent some time working remotely.
Bad company
Finally, there are companies or departments in companies that are really bad workplaces.
The K-landnews experts have seen real life examples and have heard the sentence "the only reason I am still here is because I can work remotely" more times than they care to remember.
Who needs Yahoo?
Nobody.
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