Working from Home Is the Wave of the Future

There are memos and then there are MEMOS like the one from Office Space about the TPS reports or the one sent by the Yahoo! CEO Marissa Myers (outed by AllThingsD) which banned working from home. There have been a myriad of reactions from the memo (mostly negative) and some of them are worth getting more into--and we'll do so right now.

Huffington Post (H/T Shira) wrote about why it's good for everything from the environment to the employee turnover and productivity. CNN wrote why this is a women's issue, followed up by TIME saying that is a men's issue as well. But the biggest thing of all is that Yahoo! is missing the point here, and missing the wave of the future according to Today:

By focusing more on measuring how well employees are doing their job, and worrying less about where the work gets done, companies with flexible work policies are seeing productivity go up, according to human resources experts. 

That may be one more reason American companies are adopting flexible work policies. As of last year, nearly two-thirds of employers offered flexible work rules to at least some of their employees – up from about a third in 2005, according to a national study by the Society for Human Resource Management. 

“We don’t see this trend going away,” said Michael Aitken, SHRM’s vice president of government affairs. "This is the way that work will get done in the future. I spend a great deal of time and energy in educating our members about the value that it offers.”

The key is the last part. Employers know about certain benefits of working from home (and the disadvantages of not allowing employees to take advantage of it), but it's the education of companies and those in charge of decisions like these that need to understand the pros and the cons. Not every type of job (and not every employee) will be able to work in this environment. But for the ones that are, the wave of the future is telecommuting and you better at least get educated about it before you get left behind.

(We'll discuss this more later in the week)