The Latest Organizations are rediscovering the importance of face-to-face interaction.
Management by Talking Around
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n one of her first official acts, newly minted Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer had the temerity to suggest that organizations work better when employees come to work. “To become the absolute best place
to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side,” read an internal memo leaked in late February. “Being a Yahoo isn’t just about your day-to-day job, it is about the interactions and experiences that are only possible in our offices.”
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enced workplace flexibility to be a mixed bag, at best, were not upset to see its portrayal as an unqualified productivity boon questioned. In fact, Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly soon thereafter ended his own company’s work-from-anywhere program, saying it was “fundamentally
K AT H RY N R AT H K E
The outrage from inside Yahoo and from a good portion of the business and academic communities was immediate. Mayer’s notion was derided and chided as simplistic, regressive, baseless and dangerous by many who regard “workplace flexibility” and “work-life balance” to be inviolable tenets of the modern organization. The new policy, they variously charged, was anti-feminist, anti-family, anti-productivity and anti-progress – and it was all about suspicion, control and lack of trust in employees. When the first volley of vitriol died down, however, a measure of support for the move began to emerge. Yahoo employees seemed to be reassured when it was learned that the new policy was not an acrossthe-board ban on telecommuting, but rather was specifically targeted at only 200 employees who worked from home full-time. And many business leaders, who had experi-
flawed from a leadership perspective.” Although there are valid points on both sides of the flexibility debate, it is likely that Mayer’s decision had less to do with changing a specific policy than with beginning to change a culture – one that former and current Yahoo employees had depicted as aimless, demoralizing, bloated and less and less competitive. Very simply, Mayer had concluded that restoring Yahoo would be difficult if employees were not there, that success was going to depend first and foremost on having the critical mass necessary to turn the ship around. The route back, she was betting, would be guided primarily by face-to-face interactions. She’s not alone. According to Harvard Business School professor Boris Groysberg and communication professional Michael Slind, authors of “Talk, Inc.,” companies seeking to regain or retain their competitive footing are increasingly returning to a culture of conversation to replace more distant modes of corporate communication. “Consider that one hallmark of a high-performing small company is the eminently conversational mode in which its people operate,” they wrote. “Physical proximity and open culture allow people to share key insights and data, and information moves freely and efficiently in multiple directions.”