Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer shouldn't judge staff performance on how many hours workers log on the VPN from home, but on the results they bring to the company. That's according to David Plumb, general manager, enterprise, at Telefonica O2 UK.
"What's interesting about the Yahoo decision [to stop employees working from home] is that, clearly, if you look at how they got to the answer, they looked at how many people were logging in to the VPN, how many hours they were logging in from home," said Plumb.
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"So they got the VPN research to find out how hard people were working. I suppose my question is that, when asking how hard people are working, it should be about output and their results rather than the number of hours they're logged in."
Plumb suggested that correlating the scores from annual appraisals with VPN stats could reap surprising results for Yahoo. "You could see if they're the people at the top of the range delivering great things, as judged in the annual appraisal, or are they not?" he said.
"So I think there are different ways of measuring performance in a flexible working world."
At O2, explained Plumb, his staff are "having to look at HR policies, culture and having to train managers to manage in different ways, because collaborating and managing over technology is very different to the past. We have tools like Microsoft Lync, and it only works when senior people lead from the top."
Plumb used to carry out four face-to-face meetings per month, but now does three of these over Lync.
"I've got people from Leeds to London and everywhere inbetween, and we no longer have to traveI," Plumb told Computing.
"I do that so the people who work for me see they've got permission to do it, too. People don't need to come to the office to prove they're working hard."
In Yahoo's defence, said Plumb, home working "only works when the culture changes, the senior people lead, and there are new ways of managing and ensuring performance".
