In case you missed the thousands of news stories, Yahoo announced to employees in an internal memo last week that they will be discontinue offering telecommuting and asked everyone to be physically at their offices.
Ouch! Especially if you were one of the people that took full advantage of this benefit, that’s a hard one to swallow. As a former HR guy, I also know that these sorts of decisions aren’t come to lightly. Everyone with executive offices at Yahoo HQ knew this would impact their employees.
I don’t want to spend too much time analyzing the decision though. Many companies make a similar decision about telecommuting but they don’t usually have the unpleasant task of walking back their decisions after hires have been made and lives adjusted.
My question for you is if sourcing is best suited for the office or from home (or wherever)?
Now, I can tell you straight off that I am completely biased. I have been a full-time remote worker for nearly 4 years. I don’t have any plans to change that. And I think most sourcing jobs can be done very well remotely. I know a lot of you and many of you are highly valued members of teams (full-time & contractors alike) who may never meet your internal customers. It works.
But there are a lot of advantages to being in one physical location, though. If you work on a collaborative team with many different people, there are certain efficiencies that are gained by being all in one place. Anything done in an impromptu manner has a better chance of getting done quicker. Certainly, it can help some managers understand workload and time management of their team better, too.
Then again, I appreciate how much work I can get done when I control my environment at home. When I am working on things that don’t require a lot of input from others, I can be more productive and do better work. There are times where I need activity and noise and I can head to a coffee shop or a coworking space to do that.
Is that the best situation for sourcers? Is that the best situation for you? Do you think it makes a big difference? I’m interested in your take.