Marissa Mayer, chief executive at Yahoo, may not have set out to start a national conversation about working from home when she decided that employees at that Internet company must come into the office. But she has done just that. In a memo, Ms. Mayer’s top human resources executive wrote: “Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.”
Proponents of telecommuting, however, point to numerous studies showing that people who work from home are on average more productive than other workers and that telecommuting cuts down on traffic during peak hours, reduces companies’ real estate costs and improves employee morale, leading to less turnover. Ten percent of American workers spend at least one day a week clocking in from home, according to government data. The percentage of people working exclusively from home climbed to 6.6 percent of in 2010, from 4.8 percent in 1997.
To read the original article: Working From Home vs. the Office - NYTimes.com
