No more working from home for Yahoo employees, says report

Yahoo's focus on mobile apparently requires its employees to stay in the office.

ATD is reporting that CEO Marissa Mayer let it be known yesterday -- via a memo to employees from HR head Jackie Reses -- that come June, any existing work-from-home arrangements will no longer apply.

"To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side," reads the memo, as published by ATD's Kara Swisher, to whom it was leaked.

Swisher reports that the change has rankled some workers who say they were hired with the understanding that their work locale would be flexible.

But perhaps they should have seen this coming. Last July, not long after becoming the struggling tech icon's new CEO (and not long before touting Yahoo's focus on mobile), former Googler Mayer announced that food in Yahoo's URLs Cafe in its Sunnyvale HQ would thenceforth be free. Changes to the layout of the Yahoo buildings and individual employee work areas were also begun, to, as Swisher reported at the time, make them more "collaborative and cool."

Cool? Perhaps. But the new policy apparently strikes some as anything but, and that could be important in an industry where competition for workers can be fierce (not to mention an era when telecommuting is becoming more and more accepted). Swisher quotes an unnamed tech executive as saying, "Our engineers would not put up with that. So, we'd never focus on it." And she quotes an unnamed Yahoo worker as calling the move "a morale killer."

Still, Mayer is not alone in thinking that having workers in the same place can lead to casual exchanges that in turn can lead to breakthroughs for products. Steve Jobs thought this true as well (and Mayer's alma mater apparently agrees).