In a recent announcement, Yahoo CEO, Marrissa Mayer, decided that it’s time to end “The Yahoo 4 hour Work Week!”.
From my personal experience, Yahoo has been living the “4 hour work week” with a culture of non-accountability.
Several years ago, I was working on a job advertising partnership with Yahoo.
No one on the Yahoo team would make a decision.
No one was ever “available” to make a decision.
Then, someone would come back to the table and say, OK, we have approval.
We would draft the documents and send them to their legal team.
The document was only 5 pages, mostly boilerplate stuff, but it would take several more weeks. I later learned that the “legal department” was actually outsourced to a big firm, and since their was no accountability on the part of the entire Yahoo team, the legal team just kept billing, billing, and billing.
Of course, the document that we sent to get reviewed was returned with notes saying that Yahoo could not agree to those terms, and so we would do it again.
After three attempts at working through this complete incompetence, I finally got the Yahoo “authority” on the phone, and told them to find someone else’s time to waste. (The actual text was more like “go blank yourselves and get a real job”.)
So, after hearing the news that Marrissa was going to put an end to the “4 Hour Work Week” culture at Yahoo, I knew exactly what she going after… the lack of accountability.
Good for Marrissa! Good for Yahoo!
Flexible time for employees is a great benefit. Many responsible employees can, and do work better remotely. However, Yahoo is in a position where they need all-hands-on-deck. They need a culture change.
The employees who are committed to turning Yahoo around will stay and weather the culture change that has to happen. The rest… well they’ll be posting their resume on Monster. (Does Monster even exist anymore? Oh.. that’s another story.)
