Interesting elsewhere: Yahoo!, WFH and the flexible working debate
When Yahoo! issued a memo a week ago to call time on home working, they could hardly have imagined how much debate this would provoke.
When we reported the story on Monday, many of you were quick to comment with your thoughts on why Yahoo made this decision, and what it means for other organisations, and for the future of the digital workplace.
Within days, the story was picked up by mainstream news outlets, who questioned the logic of the decision for a high-tech business like Yahoo!
- Guardian: Yahoo chief bans working from home
- BBC: Teleworking – the myth of working from home
- Wall Street Journal: Yahoo ban on working from home is misguided
- Fox News Business: Mayer Mistake? Is Yahoo work-from-home ban a morale killer?
- ZDNet: Why Yahoo’s ‘no home working’ rule will lead us back into the office
Other business leaders quickly waded into the debate, most notably Richard Branson, who wrote a passionate blog post arguing employers should give people the freedom of where to work.
Yahoo!’s move also prompted several stories on how to make a success of home working, including this one in the Guardian. Our favourite, however, was this tongue-in-cheek version from the Daily Mash. More useful advice can be found in Martin White’s excellent research paper on managing virtual teams.
Other things which caught our collective eye this week:
- On the Step Two Designs blog, James Robertson sets out why every intranet needs a strategy
- On CMSWire, Jed Cawthorne says intranet governance has never been more complex – nor more important
- William Amurgis imagines the internal communications department of the future
- Ahead of their SMILE (Social Media Inside the Large Enterprise) summit, Simply Communicate are conducting a survey on the use of mobile in the enterprise
- Findwise are conducting their annual enterprise search and findability survey
- Sam Marshall and Jane McConnell launch a new Digital Workplace group on LinkedIn
- Researchers at MIT conducted an autopsy of a dead social network. These findings are useful and interesting reading for anyone who wants to make a success of an enterprise social network
- Congratulations to all the winners of the CIPR Inside awards, which took place last night – in particular Intranetizen’s own @DigitalJonathan, whose team took home the award for best intranet
And what made us laugh this week? An early contender for Tumblr of the Year is Jim’ll Paint It. A man (Jim) with an eye for detail and far too much time on his hands, takes commissions for bizarre original artworks, which he creates using Microsoft Paint.
Examples include: “Dear Jim, please paint me a Tyrannosaurus Rex playing Connect 4 with Heston Blumenthal on a lake of fire whilst a Care Bear watches them lustfully” and “Please paint me Jimi Hendrix explaining to an owl on his shoulder what a stick of chalk is, near a forest”.
We approve.
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