Back in 2013, the then Yahoo! CEO Marissa Meyer declared the end of remote work at the company, calling back all 14,500 employees to physically work together in the office.
Meyer famously quipped that in person meetings are more productive than remote ones; and that the best ideas often come about in cafeterias or over lunches on site.
Meyer, now the CEO and Founder of her own company, Sunshine, would later depart Yahoo!, today a struggling business but once the global leader in search.
Faced with a global pandemic, companies have had no option but to resort to a remote work model. What we have learned, as a global workforce, is that companies can be successful and have a primarily remote workforce. Meyer will no doubt be regretful of her dislike of WFH, particularly as the tech sector has enjoyed so much success during these difficult times. Soaring share prices and the US stock market has subsequently hit regular all time highs.
At the time, many believed that Meyer was simply trying to make Yahoo! a more efficient, a leaner organisation with a workforce who were attending the office everyday with full accountability. Meyer had been equally concerned that those remote working staff had become less productive.
Fast forward eight years, and it is a completely different story. Meyer may have been a rockstar at Google, and faced a difficult job at Yahoo!, but her opinions of remote work was not on point. Of course the technology that exists today, such as Zoom, did not exist back in 2013 and thus communication off site was a different story back then. However, the global workforce has lived up to the challenge of working from home. WFH is the new norm, and is likely to stay for a very, very long time.
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