Everyone with a baby bump at Yahoo is smiling a little wider today. This morning, Marissa Mayer extended maternity leave by a whopping eight weeks.

Yahoo announced the new benefit this morning a few months after telling employees that they could no longer work from home. The total paid maternity leave available for mothers is 16 weeks and eight weeks for dads. If you foster, adopt, or have a child by surrogacy, you’re awarded eight weeks of paid leave.

Yahoo will also give new parents $500 to put toward baby stuff — a benefit, it seems, directly taken from Google.

Mayer is attempting to turn around company that was recently marred by slipping significance and executive-level turmoil. When she first came on board, many people pointed out that she was a product-driven, hands-on kind of CEO, one that could not only organize Yahoo and make it run more efficiently but could also look at what company had to offer.

She began this by cutting off Yahoo’s work-from-home policy, a controversial move. People felt she was getting rid of a Silicon Valley staple — the capability to work productively in the environment that suits you best. But after months of silence, Mayer recently spoke out about her decision, saying that while she understands that productivity may suffer, for her it’s more about the brainstorming that happens when people are together as a team. Yahoo’s products before Mayer were obviously not doing the company much good. She doesn’t need people to keep working on them; she needs people to come together to make them better.

But Mayer obviously understands the need for me-time. Even if you haven’t just brought life into the world. The company also announced that if you’ve been at Yahoo for more than five years, you too get eight weeks to do whatever it is that makes you feel awesome. This, too, is likely in the name of sending employees out to get refreshed and recharged before heading back into the insane Silicon Valley work world.

hat tip NBC; Marissa Mayer image via Fortune Live Media/Flickr

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer finally spoke out about the work from home policy at a conference yesterday, after keeping very hush-hush since the policy was enacted in February.

Soon after Mayer, the shining light of hope for a flailing Yahoo, joined as the company’s chief executive, she started to turn around the team dynamic. She instated Google-like food options, offered new phone benefits … and she also canceled working from home.

Yeah, so that last one doesn’t sound as awesome. The rest of the tech world thought it was a weird move, too, taking sides on whether this would promote creativity or quash employee morale.

Mayer stayed relatively quiet since, providing only company statements through a spokesperson. But today, remaining true to her product-centric form, Mayer explained the move as a way to promote “innovation.”

She began the conversation by projecting an image of elephant with the letters “WFH,” or work from home, according to CNN. Mayer explained that she needed to talk about the elephant in the room, and, of course, she said, “It’s not what’s right for Yahoo right now.”

So, what is right for Yahoo? Mayer believes that having people in the office may diminish how much they get done in a day, but this will likely improve the quality of those products.

“People are more productive when they’re alone,” she said at the conference, “But they’re more collaborative and innovative when they’re together. Some of the best ideas come from pulling two different ideas together.”

She cited Yahoo’s weather app as the latest innovation to come out of the work-from-home ban.

Marissa Mayer image via earcos/Flickr

In 2007, 7 percent of U.S. workers spent at least one of their working days in a home office. In 2010, the most recent data that the Census Bureau released, 9.4 percent were telecommuting at least one day a week.

That’s 13.4 million people across the country, and these aren’t low-level employees that we’re talking about.

In fact, the Census Bureau says that they’re more likely to be in management and business, saying that “advances in communication and information technologies have allowed for a more mobile workforce.” And a growing segment of them are programmers, developers, and engineers.

The number of computing, engineering, and science professionals who work at home grew 69 percent from 2000 to 2010.

“The matter of how people work is as it has always been: What does it take to get the job done in a way that affords an equitable balance — a quid pro quo — between the organization and the individual?” said Joseph M. Pastore, a professor emeritus at Pace University’s Lubin School of Business. “For most companies, the issue is pretty clear: Do what works.”

What wasn’t working at Yahoo was home workers who were certainly home, but — alas — not workers. They were not logging into corporate systems like Yahoo’s VPN to get their work done.

But as someone who just had a child might realize, you don’t necessarily need to throw out the baby with the bathwater. As companies like Google, LinkedIn, Netflix, Cisco, Microsoft, AirBnB, Foursquare, and IBM realize.

Unless, that is, you want to do a stealth layoff.

photo credit: Travis Isaacs via photopin cc

Telecommuting has been dead for a while

Facebook has something called lock-down, where no one can go home. Kids come to Facebook if they want to see their parents. Really. Which means that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has also been promoting the end of telecommuting, but it’s actually more difficult for her to come out and say it when she is also championing the cause of women and encouraging them to “lean in” and have kids alongside a huge career.

Both Mayer and Sandberg really want women to succeed in business. They don’t want affirmative action for women. Mayer and Sandberg have young kids, and they are giving up their time with their kids – in an extreme way – so that they can run big, important companies.

The message here is that if you want to work at a company where people are doing big and important things, you have to give up everything. It’s okay to say that. Sandberg and Mayer are giving up everything, so why can’t they ask that of everyone else?

Telecommuting is for people who don’t want to give up everything for their company. Mayer doesn’t want to work with people like that.

Companies move more efficiently if everyone is at the office

The reason flexible jobs are hard to find is that most companies demand that you show up and put in face time at the office. We have been clamoring for ages that women want flexible work, but companies don’t want to give flexible work. (In fact, women are so fed up with the lack of flexible work that they are starting businesses at a higher rate than ever, and Forbes called entrepreneurship the new women’s movement.)

The Harvard Business Review combines easily-found data to show that innovation happens faster if people work at the same office, and company culture is easier to control and more energizing if people share physical space. Also face-time is linked to higher performance, which is linked to the idea of propinquity, the word to describe why people work better if they are in the same room. If you are near someone, you get along with them better. It’s how human beings work — it’s part of our social DNA that goes back millions of years. We understand each other if we see each other, which makes sense, since we read so many nonverbal cues. So people who are physically together are more efficient, more productive, and more innovative than people who are not physically together.

This is the type of data Mayer is relying on to justify her demand that people work at the office. Sure, there is data that individual workers are more productive if you let them handle their personal life with flexible work. But there is also evidence that top firms don’t need to accommodate those people. In Silicon Valley, home to Facebook, Google, Airbnb, none of the most desirable companies make room for a personal life. They don’t have to. They have plenty of people hoping to give up their whole life to the company.

Telecommuting encourages a less dedicated workforce

The poster-child for flexible work is Deloitte. Vice chairman, Cathy Benko, wrote the book on flexible work, literally, and Deloitte even goes as far as to do consulting for other companies on how to make flexible work for women. But let’s be real. Deloitte is a consulting firm, which means people with power and big careers there must travel. A lot. And they are flexible for the sake of the client, not for their employees’ kids. If you want to telecommute at Deloitte, your career is on a slow track. It’s an alternative career.

People telecommute so they can decrease the conflict between work and personal life. Brigham Young University shows that people can work 60 hours a week as a telecommuter and still maintain low conflict in this area because of the flexibility that telecommuting enables.

Mayer doesn’t want to work with anyone who is working 60 hours a week. She is in Silicon Valley where an 80-hour week is full-time and 50-hours is part-time. In fact, women who have taken the mommy track at big law firms have been saying for a decade that at top firms, 50 hours is a part-time week.

This is true of startups as well. I have written before that the reason women are not startup founders is that startups require 120-hour workweeks. When I cut back at my own startup to 60 hours a week, my coworkers talked about how I had basically quit working.

CEOs should get to choose who they work with

If you want to have a slower career, you deserve to be able to make that choice. But you shouldn’t get to work with people who are giving up everything for their job. It’s not fair. Of course it’s fine for you to leave work to eat dinner with your kids and put them to bed. Actually, I think it’s really nice. But it’s not fair to go home to your kids at 5 p.m. and start working again at 9 p.m. when your coworker has been at the office those five hours. Your coworker deserves more than that.

Who do you know who has given up more of their life for work than Marissa Mayer? I can’t think of one other person, actually. She was renowned as one of the hardest workers at Google, where hundred-hour weeks are de rigueur. And she is renowned for being the only CEO in US history to deliver a baby while running a Fortune 500 company. Marissa Mayer can tell anyone that they are not putting in enough hours. She’s giving up everything for work; she has a right to demand that her coworkers do that same.

This is true for most firms where A-players work. People who want to be top in their field want to work with other top players. That seems fair.

The future of work is better with Marissa Mayer running the show

Mayer is more honest than everyone else. The workforce divides into two halves: people who try very hard to decrease the conflict in their life between work and home, and people who try very hard to get to the top of the work world. You can’t do both. You know that, you just don’t like that Mayer is institutionalizing it.

Once we get honest about what you need to do to get to the top, we can start having a real discussion about how to make choices in adult life. The reality of today’s workforce is that if you want to have a big job where you have prestige and money and power, you probably need a stay-at-home spouse. Or two full-time nannies. Which means most people don’t have the option to go on the fast track, because most people have not set their lives up this way.

So let’s just admit that most of us are not on the fast-track. Stop bitching that people won’t let slow people on the fast track. Stop saying that it’s bad for family. It’s great for family. It means people will not continue operating under the delusion that you can be a hands-on parent and a top performer. People will make real choices and own those choices.

This is true for men and women. There is no longer a gender divide at work. The declaration that Yahoo no longer allows telecommuting is monumental because Marissa Mayer smashed the last shard of the glass ceiling. Today, anyone can rise to the top if they give up their life to do it.

Women graduate college at a higher rate than men, and women earn more money than men. Until there are kids. Then women slow down. By choice. Women tend to start slowing down at work around age 28  in order to be done having kids by the time they are 35. Generation Y women are well aware of this, and the pattern is so ubiquitous that business schools unofficially let women in earlier than men because women need to finish working at full-capacity so early in their career.

Which means the top performers at work are mostly men. But it’s not a gender thing, it’s a time thing. That’s what Marissa Mayer is saying: Don’t think about coming to my company unless you’ll give everything for your job.

Mayer is not saying parenting is bad. She is saying she doesn’t want to work with hands-on parents. But look at the CEOs of any Fortune 500 company: They rarely meet anyone who is a hands-on parent aside from their spouse. Hands-on parents don’t exist at the top of the Fortune 500.

People still have lots of choices, you just can’t have everything

Family historian Stephanie Coontz writes that today’s workforce is so demanding that families can only handle having one person in the workforce. She shows how the average work week does not allow for people to take care of children, which means that one partner needs to drop out of the workforce and take care of kids. The Harvard Business Review reports that if someone works 60 hours a week, they are three times more likely to have a stay-at-home spouse.

This workplace shift has already happened. Mayer is just forcing us to admit it.

If you want to parent — really be there for your kids — then you need an alternative career track. You can telecommute, you can work part-time, you can freelance, you just can’t work with people who don’t need those same accommodations.

So today, people have choices, people have more control over their lives than ever, and people have good information to make intelligent decisions. Mayer is forcing you to make hard decisions. You don’t like that. But don’t blame her.

Penelope Trunk founded Brazen Careerist and two other startups. Her career advice runs in 200 newspapers. She lives on a farm in Wisconsin and homeschools her sons. This story originally appeared on Penelope’s blog.

[Photo credit: earcos via photopin cc]

But in many ways, I’m also the best kind of remote employee. I get things done. I’m available for meetings at odd hours. Need to have a conference call with the team in Bangalore late at night? Sure. I don’t clock out as soon as I leave the office. As a product guy, I’m always paying attention to products. It annoys friends when I’m on vacation and I will dissect a suboptimal point-of-sale transaction experience on the spot. I can’t help it. I love what I do.

That’s why I find the recent changes to Yahoo’s work-at-home policy bewildering. Yes, Yahoo has a lot of deadweight. Yes, Yahoo needs to jettison that deadweight. But there is more deadweight that comes into Yahoo’s offices on a regular basis than there is that works from home. (Just based on sheer numbers this has to be true.)

There are plenty of dedicated work-from-home employees out there. One of my closest friends arranged a work-from-home situation with his employer. He’s often cooking dinner while he’s “on the clock.” But he gets his work done. He’s been doing it for nine years. When he started, it was an exception. Now it’s become very common at his company. Because relatively few companies support working from home to this degree, it also serves as a retention tool. It would take a lot for him to give up the flexibility he has.

Virgin Group founder Richard Branson took to the company’s blog to criticize the Yahoo decision:

We like to give people the freedom to work where they want, safe in the knowledge that they have the drive and expertise to perform excellently, whether they at their desk or in their kitchen. Yours truly has never worked out of an office, and never will.

I’ve been a remote employee in more normal situations and I’ve managed remote employees. What I care about is whether the work gets done and done at the quality level that is needed.

The best employees also know what is stupid and what is needed.

In one case, my entire development team was based in Dublin. But I was required to be in the office in Virginia on most days. I had to deal with an hour commute each way so that I could come into the office and email with people half a world way. That is stupid.

In another case, my employer was widely supportive of telecommuting, but my specific manager wasn’t. My team was based in San Francisco but I had to work from San Jose, where my manager was. That is stupid.

When I’ve had remote employees, I’ve trusted them to get the job done. And most of them didn’t disappoint. But the ones who were screwups would have been screwups whether or not they were working from home.

Remote work does have its challenges, but some of these are actually opportunities. I found that when I was working with developers who were remote, I had to be much more explicit in what I documented for requirements. I didn’t take for granted that they understood certain things because they happened to be in the same room. You know what? That also worked better because there were fewer misunderstandings.

If the problem is that you have lazy, unmotivated employees, the solution is to get rid of the lazy, unmotivated employees. But there isn’t a 1:1 correlation between working from home and being lazy and unmotivated.

In a situation like Yahoo’s ultimatum, you have an adverse selection problem. The best, most motivated remote workers will leave because they are readily employable. The lazy, unmotivated ones will find a way to drag their asses into the office and will goof around there. Never underestimate the ability for employees to goof off in the office. I recently toured the Boeing factory in Everett, Wa., and an employee had Facebook on his screen.

The other argument in favor of having employees on site is that it can foster collaboration. I can buy that argument in certain cases, but not in the way large companies like Yahoo work. At an early stage startup, it can make a lot of sense and you can iterate much faster when everyone is in the same room. Ideas that seem stupid at first can get tossed around and turned into something. (Or vice versa.)

But large companies often have offices around the world. When I worked at Aol, at various times I had dev teams in Dublin, Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Bangalore. Sitting in a company facility on the other side of the world or the other side of the city isn’t much different from working from a home office or coffee shop. Unless Yahoo is committed to putting all of the members of a team together, the claims that this is about promoting creativity (and not perceived control) ring hollow.

Besides, technology offers a lot of ways to help spark collaboration. I use a Twitter a lot for collaboration with a broad network. In corporate environments, I’ve used tools like IM, MediaWiki, and Yammer to brainstorm and collaborate.

We’re in an extremely competitive labor market in Silicon Valley. It seems short-sighted to limit your talent pool to just those who live close to the office or are willing to endure a one-hour slog on the 101.

Rocky Agrawal is an analyst focused on the intersection of local, social and mobile. He is a principal analyst at reDesign mobile. Previously, he launched local and mobile products for Microsoft and AOL. He blogs at http://blog.agrawals.org; and tweets at @rakeshlobster.

[Top image credit: Elena Elisseeva/Shutterstock]

Yahoo sent a memo to employees yesterday, letting them know that they were expected to show up at the office every day. Shocking!

After All Things D reported the new policy yesterday and then followed up with the full memo, literally hundreds of people commented and tweeted to express their disgust with Yahoo’s management.

The new policy will most directly affect several hundred people who had negotiated work-at-home agreements (out of a total workforce of about 12,000) and who may not be able to work in a Yahoo office without relocating. It will also limit the ability of Silicon Valley-based employees to take the occasional work-at-home day. So we can expect other Valley companies will capitalize on this memo by trying to poach disgruntled Yahoo employees.

Is chief executive Marissa Mayer crazy? Is her chief of human resources, Jackie Reses, who sent the memo, just another corporate slave driver? Are the masses going to rise up out of their cubicle farms and revolt?

The answer to all of these questions is surely no.

To be sure, flexible work hours are a treasured perk of working in Silicon Valley. Many startups — and a few larger, more established companies — take a very liberal view towards employees taking time off, working from home whenever they choose, and generally doing whatever they want as long as the work gets done.

And granted, Yahoo’s work-at-the-office policy doesn’t do anything to make the company look more hip or cool. As one commenter quipped, “Yahoo continues its impressive drive down the fast lane of the information superhighway. In your father’s Oldsmobile. With the left blinker on. At 45 kph.”

But Reses’ memo makes an important point:

Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.

Some companies have figured out how to replicate that rapid, person-to-person information exchange using virtual tools, like Basecamp, Campfire, or even Skype and various IM tools. But it doesn’t work for every company. That’s because the bandwidth of these virtual tools is lower than face to face contact.

It takes a real effort, and widespread support from the company culture, to make up for the shortcomings that virtual communications impose. Some companies can pull it off. Others can’t. But that doesn’t necessarily correlate with a company’s ability to do business progressively, inventively, and quickly.

How does your company handle working remotely versus working in the office? What works best? Share your experiences in the comments below.

Yahoo employees will be seeing a lot more of the corporate sign, above. Source: Acme/Flickr

So you’ve got this idea for a product. You pull a few friends in and you start working at the local coffee shops – or, if you’re frugal, your home office. You plug in your Mac and camp out all day drinking the free refills and bumming the wifi. You’re nimble. Not tied down to a space, free to enjoy the flexibility that comes with being an entrepreneur. Cool!

You and your team check-in regularly on Skype, you use Basecamp and Pivotal Tracker and you get together a couple times a week on a video conference or in-person. You’re saving a fortune by not having an office, right? You’re doing everything right to bootstrap, right?

Wrong.

The “working from home/working from Starbucks” bootstrap is one of the great fallacies of start-up life. Here are five reasons why your start-up needs to find some proper office space right now:

Productivity – You’re functioning at about 75 percent productivity in a coffee shop or at home. The distractions are everywhere. At the coffee shop it’s the annoying person on the phone; at home it’s the cat, the dog, the neighbor, the internet is down, the TV is on…

The fact is you’re not at “the office” so your time is more malleable.  You can “meet for lunch” or “wait for the FedEx guy” or whatever excuse you prefer. No one is holding you accountable.

You may technically work long hours, but you’d need to work a 16-hour day to overcome the productivity gap. And despite the blasé use of the phrase “100-hour work week” the fact is very few entrepreneurs work those hours regularly, if ever (that’s 7 days a week, 15 hours a day – pretty tough).

Space to think – If you’re serious about building a company –a real company, not an app or a feature – than you’re going to need space.  You’re going to need whiteboards and desks and printers and stable Internet service and phone booths and meeting space.

A 30,000 ft approach tends to work at the earliest of stages (hence the well-worn “conceived on a napkin” cliché), but unpacking the intricacies of customer service or mapping out hypotheses about your product iterations are awfully hard without disposable surface area.

Yes, there are virtual tools for all of this, but the reality is that these tools are largely poor substitutes for real-life problem solving and company building.  The virtual tools are designed as supplements, not as replacements.  One of the reasons why incubators (Techstars, YC, etc.) exist is for the energy and the space.

Don’t lose that third space – Without space, your boundaries between work and play dissolve to the point that you don’t know how to work and how to play.  When you live in coffee shops or work at home you tend to go at one speed, whether you’re crushed for time or not. When you have an office with a product deadline looming, you stay there until it’s done.

When you miss deadlines at Starbucks it’s so much easier to write them off because you’re working remotely and “these things take time” and “hey, look how much money you’re saving by NOT having an office.” And if you’re the kind of person who used to have the coffee shop as a place to go and clear your head while pounding out some element of the business, that’s no longer the case.

World-class teams don’t work from home – For a little while you can get away with attracting people to your kitchen table, but very soon you’ll be competing with other start-ups for talent – and your French-Press and Brita is not going to get it done.

People want to be part of something – especially early in a company’s life – and that “something” needs to feel like an inspiring space to work. This place needs to (in some small way) say “we’re building a great company here and you should stick around.” Without even a small space with a shingle that says “here’s where we grind and make magic happen” it’s just too easy for folks to go work somewhere else.

Space is cheap – Office space is cheap and plentiful assuming you don’t need super nice digs. It’s also surprisingly cheaper than you think when you do a fully loaded cost analysis. When you’re not at the office, the chances of you bringing your lunch are probably lower and the coffee is definitely more expensive.

The price of a small, fully-functional office for three people in Cambridge right now runs about $800 all in.  For almost a year, we had 7 people in roughly 550 square feet. In our new San Francisco office, we have 2,000 feet and don’t pay too much more than we did in Cambridge. If you really think you have a company – a real company, remember – put up the $2,500 for 3 months of rent and start building.

I am a notorious stickler for keeping the burn rate low, but I realize it’s important to know where to turn the dials  Lean, bootstrapped offices help you quickly discover whether you have just another good idea or the capacity to deliver something people want.

And if your company isn’t worth a few hundred bucks a month in rent, then maybe you need to think hard about whether you’re working on the right really big opportunity.

Photo by Ben McLeod via Flickr