I don't know anything about the situation Yahoo, but it's quite possible that a small number of people exploiting a perk can make the other people feel resentment.

I don't know anything about the situation at Yahoo, but in any company of 14,000 people, I find it hard to believe inter-team/department tension is based on objective reality.

e.g. If sales and engineering don't get along, engineering will tend to believe sales is always taking advantage of sleazy junkets and sales will tend to believe engineering is playing games all day, regardless of the reality. [1]

So removing perks from one or both feuding groups can hardly be expected to address any underlying problems, real or imagined.

[1] Those situations are basically the adult version of the infamous Robber's Cave Study. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber%27s_Cave_study#Robbers_c...

This is a good point, and bad management is going to be bad management no matter what.

However, this seems about intra-team morale. Did the biz people really know that Joe the UX guy was working from home?

(Honestly, if I don't see the biz or marketing person at his desk, I assume he's off at a customer site somewhere. Maybe this doesn't work in reverse from biz-to-dev.)

Part of the problem here is considering working at home a perk.

These were people who had negotiated full time work at home for various reasons (probably as a condition of employment). They aren't really exploiting a perk.

Further I would never lead based upon reducing resentment -- I remember one workplace where a non-contributor became infuriated that technical discussions happened in group email, demanding that HR step in and stop it. They resented that the people who knew the most had the floor the longest, and demanded that the process happen in a roundtable meeting room format where everyone can show that they were a part of it.

Whether it's called "condition of employment" or "a perk" the effect on other employees' morale can be the same. Other employees can, correctly or not, see themselves as busting their ass while Joe gets to slack off.

> Further I would never lead based upon reducing resentment

You give an example where an entire group is working well, and a single person is mad. That is not a good counterpoint against the theory that you should take action if one person is happy and many others are unhappy.

I'll say again (although I shouldn't need to) that I don't know if this was the situation at Yahoo.

I think that's an oversimplification. 200 people were full time work-at-home, probably out of the area. I imagine many people at Yahoo live in the area and have an office, and just choose to work from home some days. They aren't full time work-at-home, but they are definitely affected by this edict.

That's what I thought. I believe the actual number the number to be higher.

I took it from the linked article-

But for the most part, those employees said, those concerns have been eased by managers who assured them that the real targets of Yahoo’s memo were the approximately 200 employees who work from home full time.

Right, that's what Yahoo is saying now. It would be interesting to hear if there were a lot of people working from home a couple of days a week, or if that was forbidden before the new policy. Because if this really only affects 200 people... why does it even matter much to Yahoo matter whether they do it or not?