Sometimes It's All Hands On Deck

Telecommuting has been all over the news this week. First, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer changed the company’s policy that allowed employees to work (sometimes entirely) from home. Yahoo tried to put the story in perspective with a press release that said, "This isn't a broad industry view on working from home. This is about what is right for Yahoo right now."

Just a few days later, Best Buy announced that it would eliminate its renowned Results-Only Work Environment, a program that allowed corporate employees to work when and were they chose, as long as the quality of the work met the company’s standards. Like Yahoo’s change, it’s not a total ban, but corporate employees are now expected to work 40 hours a week and to come into the office "as much as possible." Best Buy spokesperson Matt Furman said, "Bottom line, it's 'all hands on deck' at Best Buy and that means having employees in the office as much as possible to collaborate and connect on ways to improve our business."

So, are Yahoo and Best Buy doing the right thing? As a consultant to major brands on culture and employer branding, I think they are.

Working from home -- a lost luxury?

Both these companies are engaged in turnarounds. Smart companies react to changing situations with their own changes, so I see these moves as responsive to business needs. It’s also reflective of the companies’ faith in their talent to help them steer the ship out of the storm.

Mayer and Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly know that they need the collective brainpower of their employees to come up with great and wonderful ideas. It takes a village, after all. In fact, Marissa Mayer was brought to Yahoo to make the company more like Google – and neither Google nor Facebook, both of whom have made it so easy for us to connect with people virtually, allows unlimited telecommuting.

Bloomberg, a hugely successful digital company, was a pioneer in seeing the value of instant, in-office, business exchanges in real-time. Their buildings famously have no offices, only shared spaces. It’s even part of their employer branding: “Our wide-open workspaces encourage collaboration.”

Bloomberg's shared workspace. Photo by Willie Jeung.

Many other companies limit or ban working from home. In fact, 15 of Forbes 100 Best Companies to Work For have no telecommuting program.

Talent management professionals have long known that it’s a business imperative to have the right talent for the right jobs at the right time. Now we coming to recognize that they need to be in the right place too.

Need help changing your culture? Email me and we’ll talk.

How to Use Facebook's Social Graph for Recruiting

A sneak peek at Brands Undercover

BP was responsible for the worst oil spill in history. Among its many consequences were some drastic effects on the company's talent acquisition. How did the BP careers site change both during and after the disaster?

Coke and Pepsi were invented in the same part of the country, eight years apart. But Interbrand values Coke at $71.8 billion, while Pepsi is valued at only $14.5 billion. The products are virtually identical, so what's the $55 billion difference?


What do the employer brand taglines of Google, Marriott, ENGlobal, and the Virginia National Guard all have common? And why is that a bad thing?

Discover the answers to these and other questions at Brands Undercover: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Authentic Employer Branding in the Digital World. 

Hosted by the President of Brandemix, Jody Ordioni, this hour-long presentation is a funny and honest look at how major companies are succeeding, and failing, at employer branding. Whether you're beginning your branding efforts or re-branding a well-known name, Jody's insights will ensure that your brand is clear, consistent, and compelling.


Register now for this FREE event, which includes a complimentary breakfast.


Monday, March 19, from 8:30-10:30 a.m. at the New York Times Building in NYC.


We hope to see you there!

Google+ or Minus?

Do you have a Google+ account? 40 million people do, according to Google CEO Larry Page. But are you using it? That’s a very different question. Metrics, trends, and public opinion are all showing that Google’s new social network simply hasn’t caught on.

Let’s look at the numbers. Data analytics company Chitika has shown that, after a huge increase in traffic when Google+ went public on September 20, traffic has since dropped back down to the same level as when the service was available only by invitation. This means that a lot of people activated their account, which was particularly easy for Gmail users, but haven’t gone back to the site since.

Perhaps most telling is that Google’s own management team barely uses the service. Mashable’s Ben Parr wrote a brilliant piece breaking down the involvement of Google’s senior leadership. In the first three months of Google+’s existence, CEO Page had only posted seven times; co-founder Sergey Brin had posted 12. Eleven executives, including executive chairman Eric Schmidt, hadn’t posted anything at all. By contrast, Mark Zuckerberg is very active on Facebook and Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has tweeted thousand of times. Schmidt finally broke his Google+ silence with a post about Steve Jobs’ death, 107 days after the service launched.

An informal Twitter poll from ReadWriteWeb asked followers why they weren’t using Google+. Some people responded that their friends weren’t on it, which seems to be a cyclical argument. Others echoed Romit Mehta, who responded, “Twitter is good for ‘fast, real time’ and Facebook is where my friends and family are. G+ solves no problem.”

Image courtesy of Kenny Strawn

A Google search of “I love Google Plus” returns 207,000 results. “I like Google Plus” gets 1.18 million results. “I don’t like Google Plus” returns 300,000 results, while “I hate Google Plus” returns 20,700 results. My conclusion? While more than a million people like the service, more people don’t like it than love it. And 10,000 people hate it. (These ratios were about the same when I searched for “Google+” instead of “Google Plus.”)

How about one of my favorite topics – mobile? Google+ does indeed come as an iPhone app. The latest version, released October 4, has only 39 votes (not much interest) and a rating of three stars out of five (not much love). One reviewer wrote, “Is it really THAT hard for a HUGE company like Google to make an iPad native version?” Google seems to be missing opportunities at every turn.

Here’s my personal experience with Google+. I have ten “friends” in different circles. Since I joined on July 9 (three weeks after launch, thank you), my stream has a total of six posts by four people. One of those posts is a notification that a friend changed her profile photo. These are people who regularly update their Facebook, Twitter, or both. They’re just not using Google+.

At BRANDEMiX, we recommend that our clients spend an hour a day on social media, which includes Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Is Google+ currently worth that commitment? I have to say no. Will it ever be? That’s the 64-billion-dollar question.