Marissa Mayer and the Broadstuff Remote Workbot

How Marissa Mayer found out that Yahoo work-from-home employees were slacking - Business Insider:

Like a lot of companies, Yahoo has something called a Virtual Private Network or VPN. Remote workers can use it to securely log into Yahoo's network and do work. After spending months frustrated at how empty Yahoo parking lots were, Mayer consulted Yahoo's VPN logs to see if remote employees were checking in enough. Mayer discovered they were not — and her decision was made.

Those who have been reading the various Tech News sites, Twitter et al over the last week or so will know this has caused quite a flurry, as the techno-drumbeat has pretty much boomed out the message that there will be more and more remote working, despite most of us knowing that Wikis are a PITA to manage and Skype conferences are crap compared to the real thing.

Smart Work's Janet Parkinson notes, working remotely is just a part of an overall solution, and needs to be managed within an overall smart work strategy, and if not managed can lead to a lot of peanut butter. More at issue is the possible impact on Innovation, critical for knowledge businesses. As Janet notes:

“… telecommuting unfortunately reduces innovation. And because innovation brings in much higher profits than the traditional goal of corporate efficiency, many firms are now learning the value of emphasizing innovation as a primary strategic business goal.”

He also comments how face to face interaction increases collaboration, competition and energy, and how it increases learning and helps break down functional silos.

Companies like Google and Yahoo where innovation is at the core of their business therefore need to keep employees physically together and Google have known this for a long time – they only allow employees to work from home on a case by case basis.

I suspect if you look at the leverage for quite a lot of business roles, a 10% increase in Integration, Impact and Innovation has far more effect on the bottom than a 10% reduction in desk space costs. We would predict that this marks the high point in the remote work shift for this cycle, probably until far higher bandwidth and collaboration tools become available. (It's also a size thing - its hard to goof off in small teams, much easier in huge corporates)

But in the meantime, all is not lost for all those remote workers still out there. We modestly offer you the groundbreaking Broadstuff Remote Workbot - just install our App on your PC, link it to your Corporate Intranet and your email and it will randomly access the Intranet pages and whatever passes as your corporate research resource, scan other people according to criteria you fill in, mark emails as read, and randomly select a sample to reply to each hour with suitably corporate apparatchikly replies. If you have Yammer or some other Corporate Tweeting tool, you can use the Broadstuff Social Media Climber tool (Social Business 2.0 Version) to pretend you are present online there too. If you buy the both you also get the Boss Pinger , which alerts you by SMS when a bossmail has come in so you can handle it while at the mall/beach/etc. The bundle is cheap at the price, just 5% of your annual salary will do nicely.

After all, consider the alternatives...