Perhaps 2,500 years ago, the Tao Te Ching observed that if you don’t trust people, you make them untrustworthy. You will get burned every now and again, but even then, the vast majority of the organization will see that you have their best interests at heart and that the violators were only looking out for themselves (and deserved what they got — see previous post).

Marissa Mayer’s (CEO of Yahoo) recent edict cancelling a long-standing policy allowing telecommuting headlined the message “We don’t trust you!” The immediate downside is that those who were not abusing the system will feel betrayed, and it’s safe to assume that these were among the company’s best performers. Ms. Mayer should expect many of these to leave and be prepared for resentment on the part of the others. In other words, there will be damage to the trust that still remains at Yahoo.

Here’s the key point: You can’t compare the situation at Yahoo with with successful organizations, such as Ms. Mayer’s previous employer, Google. A recent article in the New York Times noted that:

It should probably be obvious at this juncture, but Google doesn’t require employees to work from the office. It doesn’t even keep track of who’s there. The notion seems to have never occurred to anyone. “I don’t think we’ve ever had a policy on that,” [Google spokesman Jordan] Newman said, but “we do expect employees to figure out a work schedule with their team and manager. It’s not a free-for-all.”

But Google is an effective and successful powerhouse (10 times Yahoo’s revenue, and roughly 30 times its EPS) that by all reports already has a high degree of trust. So Ms. Mayer’s first task is to rebuild a basic level of mutual trust, Einheit, and strange as it seems, forcing people back into the office may be a way to do it.  As noted in the last post, Boyd suggested that you build Einheit by putting people into situations where “each individual can observe and orient himself simultaneously to the others and to the variety of changing situations.” This sort of implies an advantage to being together during the rebuilding phase.

If she can get the trust engine going again, lots of options become available, and then you can start comparing Yahoo to Google. Until then, don’t forget the old saying about desperate times.

The German word Einheit would literally translate as “one-ness” or “unity,” but Boyd (who did not speak German) often used the phrase “mutual trust.” In his framework, it also has the connotations of “cohesion,” “similar implicit orientation,” and even such awkward phrases as “overall mind-time-space scheme.” As you can see, it’s a powerful concept, and we often say that without Einheit, don’t worry about the rest of this framework because you won’t be able to use it anyway.

Building Einheit is a process:

Expose individuals, with different skills and abilities, against a variety of situations—whereby each individual can observe and orient himself simultaneously to the others and to the variety of changing situations. Why ? In such an environment, a harmony, or focus and direction, in operations is created by the bonds of implicit communications and trust that evolve as a consequence of the similar mental images or impressions each individual creates and commits to memory by repeatedly sharing the same variety of experiences in the same ways. (Organic Design, 18)

Difficult to build, but not difficult at all to destroy. One easy way is to not take action when people openly violate the underlying moral code, whether it be implicit or explicit. You can turn this into a weapon by employing propaganda and rumor to accuse people within the target organization of such violations and mocking the organization for not taking action.

With all that in mind, read the article “When trolls come out from under their bridges, it’s bad news for scientific discourse,” in Science News.

When you do take action, especially if your troll is a top performer as measured by the numbers, keep one primary consideration in mind: The other members of the organization must see your action as fair and deserved. So you probably want to start with a gentle reminder and a suggestion for an apology. Another thing to consider: Are you a troll? How do you know? One final thought: How many trolls do you have? If the answer is “lots,” then being a troll is the company style, hardly a violation of the moral code, and you’d look (and be) stupid taking action against an individual.

Jay Greene has an interesting article on Cnet.com today: “Does telecommuting really reduce employee performance? Academic research suggests that working more than one day a week away from the office, for jobs that require a lot of collaboration with colleagues, can cut into performance.”

As you can tell from the title, it appears to support Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s decision to terminate telecommuting.  A couple of points, though. Mayer’s decision was justified on the grounds that most telecommuters were “goofing off,” not, for example, logging on to VPN. And second, if you read down through the article, you find that what the research really says is that telecommuting requires an appropriate organizational climate.

In particular, successful telecommuting requires a high degree of Einheit — mutual trust. For one thing, all members of the organization must be rewarded, and believe that they will be rewarded, on their contributions to achieving the organization’s goals and objectives, not on their ability to suck up to the boss at work. Want to make a bet on the situation at Yahoo?

As the article concludes:

In the end, companies that do well with remote workers are the ones that are most willing to take the chance that it will work and support employees when they are toiling away at home.

“There’s no question that technology makes it possible,” Christensen said. “But the culture has to support it.”

My guess is that Boyd’s “blitzkrieg climate” (Fingerspitzengefühl, etc.) will work nicely. As anyone who has ever tried to implement lean/maneuver warfare knows, however, it requires strong leadership.

On the other hand, if you know what you’re doing and get the climate going, the vast majority of people will choose to work from where they can best accomplish their missions.