Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer was right to ban working from home, right?

“Perhaps Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer had a point about working from home (WFH) after all,” Jake Novak writes for CNBC. “Mayer drew enormous criticism last year when one of her first acts as CEO was to banning at-home working or telecommuting. People called Mayer every bad name in the book, and even accused her of selling out her fellow working mothers. More importantly, critics insisted Mayer had bought into a series of misconceptions and outright lies about telecommuters being unreliable and not hard working. And many employment experts warned that this ‘mistake,’ would leave Yahoo behind in the race for the tech world’s best talent.”

“Just a month after Mayer instituted the telecommuting ban at Yahoo, investigators at the U.S. Patent Office found that a large number of that department’s at-home workers routinely lied about the amount of hours they put in and that oversight of the ‘telework’ program was completely ineffective, the Washington Post reported,” Novak writes. “To make matters worse, the Patent Office now stands accused of burying and basically covering up the most damning parts of its own internal report. All this as the Patent Office’s infamous backlog has only grown larger, stifling a vital aspect of America’s entrepreneurial economy.”

“It’s fair to say that this Patent Office farce should take at least some of the heat off of Mayer. Clearly, at-home work abuse does exist and the temptations are real for everyone who tries it. But before anyone decides that this budding scandal proves Mayer was completely in the right, one has to remember that there’s an enormous difference between the working culture for federal workers in Washington, DC and tech workers in Silicon Valley,” Novak writes. “Let’s face it, jobs with the federal government isn’t exactly famous for attracting the kind of workaholic, 80-hour-a-week types. A recent study by the Heritage Foundation showed that federal workers put in about three hours a week less than the average private sector worker. And when you add in all the vacation time, sick time and other perks, federal employees work a month less per year than non-public employees… In other words, allowing federal workers to work at home is like putting Bart Simpson in an independent study program. I predict we’ll learn of similar abuses in other federal teleworking arrangements in the months to come. I wouldn’t expect the same amount of abuse in Silicon Valley, or anywhere else in the private sector.”

Read more in the full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]