Present,Ma’am

Superwoman and CEO Marissa Mayer has sparked off a touchy debate by her new rule that doesn’t permit Yahoo employees to work from home. If not implicitly,Mayer has not-so-subtly implied that she thinks employees working from home are largely goofing off and that they’d be far more productive if they came to office everyday. God help those thousands of employees,if Mayer is planning a work ethic based on her own formidable standards. This is a woman who,after getting a computer science degree,specialised in artificial intelligence,and can take credit for Google’s famous,unembellished homepage. She’s clearly not working for money; Mayer already has $300 million in the bank and is in the Fortune list of top 20 tech people in the world. But it’s not her qualifications or illustrious career,rather the fact that she took a two-week maternity leave,which makes me think that Mayer’s actually Supergirl,masquerading as one of us lesser mortals. Naturally,she’s not going to see any reason why people need more flexibility in their work lives. But most of us are not like her who can effortlessly raise kids and head a listed company while giving quotes like: “I don’t need much sleep”.

The uncomfortable truth is: Mayer is right. Unless you really have a Zen approach and you’ve trained yourself to switch gears remarkably efficiently between household chores and making spreadsheets,working from home is more like a Utopian fantasy that never quite works out. Of course,I’m not talking about the rare and extremely motivated sort,or somebody with the staggering talent of Leo Tolstoy (he was writing while fighting as a soldier during the Crimean War). I’m talking about the regular qualified employee with specific tasks and deadlines. People argue that technology makes it possible for them to work just as efficiently from anywhere,and while that’s perfectly true,work can’t just be condensed into efficiency. It’s as much about bouncing off new and creative ideas with colleagues,coffee breaks and no matter how pointless statistics says daily meetings are,they are imperative to keep lines of communication between co-workers open. Facetime and Skype are just not the same thing.

Maybe it’s a little unfair to bracket every working-from-home employee as a lucky goofball because people thrive under different work conditions. I can only speak for myself and my work requires a lot of self-motivation and distraction-free time. Working at home isn’t for me since I’m distracted even by the word distraction. On the days I’m attempting to work at home,I end up watching Gossip Girl and trying to find myself something interesting to eat. Before I know it,the day’s over and I’m feeling guilty and more than a little frustrated. I find I achieve much more on days I go into my office and have some entirely meaningless conversations with two colleagues.

But it’s also true that many women drop out of the workforce because of inflexible rules that require them to clock in daily. Juggling a career with family responsibilities keeps getting harder. Eventually,companies will have to arrive at a happy medium between working in the office and from home. With the Earth’s fledging natural resources,it is very silly to insist that people waste petrol to commute an hour to do what they could from home. I suspect a day is not far off when we have permanent Skype on,and we can watch and have conversations with colleagues in real time,a sort of virtual office,with large TV screens,or such simulations much better than the ones currently available. Technology will ensure we can almost physically be together,while being apart. Till then,it’s got to be innovation the old-fashioned way: in conference rooms or cubicles.

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