Struggling electronics retailer Best Buy, long known for a corporate culture that rewards employees for performance rather than office attendance, is following in Yahoo’s footsteps.

A week after Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer banned working from home, Best Buy announced that it is ending its flexible workplace policies and will require its 4,000 or so headquarters staff to work a traditional 40-hour week at the office.

Best Buy spokesman Jeff Shelman said the decision is “totally about making sure we do everything we can to reinvigorate the company for all our stakeholders.” 

The new policy applies to the electronics retailer’s headquarters in Richfield, Minn., and not to most of the company’s 160,000 employees – dubbed “blue shirt” sales associates -- who work in stores.

Shelman emphasized that the new policy doesn’t mean an end to all flexibility.

“If you have a sick kid or say, like today, there’s nine inches of snow on the ground, or you have to go to the dentist, you can have a conversation with your manager,” he said.

The move comes a week after Best Buy announced it would lay off 400 employees at its headquarters, which the company said would help save about $150 million. The electronics retailer also had some good news: On Friday, it posted promising fourth-quarter results, as revenue from U.S. stores open longer than 14 months rose 0.9 percent.

But the last year has been hard on Best Buy, during which it announced the closure of dozens of stores. In July, the company announced it would lose 2,400 jobs; a company statement this week said there would be more layoffs this year. CEO Hubert Joly took the helm in August after former CEO Brian Dunn abruptly resigned in April 2012.

Best Buy had long-touted its unorthodox workplace, which began in 2005 with a program called Results Only Work Environment, or ROWE. Employees were evaluated on performance alone and were not beholden to a schedule or to the office.   

Jody Thompson, a former Best Buy employee who implemented the program there, said that when she left the company in 2007, about 80 percent of the corporate office – between 2,500 and 3,000 employees – had been trained in ROWE. She said nearly all took advantage of the flexible schedule that came with a ROWE-focused work environment. Thompson left Best Buy to co-found Culture Rx with another Best Buy employee.

“It was going really well,” she said. “But over time, more and more happened in terms of new management coming in. There wasn’t the right thinking in place to continue to evolve, so they just decided go to back to 1952.”  

Best Buy’s CEO doesn’t blame ROWE for its woes, Shelman said.

“There is no cause and effect that the struggles we’ve had as a company is directly tied to the flexible work schedule,” he said. “It’s just that this time and place the decision has been made that we want as many people as possible physically in position.”

After an investor presentation in November, Joly told the Star Tribune that he wanted employees to feel “disposable as opposed to indispensable.”

Key Banc analyst Brad Thomas has watched Best Buy for 12 years and said he’s not surprised by the company’s decision, noting that the new management team comes from outside the company. “This kind of policy would be the type of thing they’re trying to change about the company from top to bottom,” he said.

But he said even the smartest management team may not be able to save Best Buy in the long run. The practice of “showrooming,” in which customers visit a Best Buy store to check out an item like a TV and then buy it online for less, has cut into the company’s sales.

Despite the announcements by Yahoo and Best Buy, working from home appears to be growing rather than shrinking. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that 13.4 million people worked from home at least part-time during a typical week in 2010. 

And research indicates that telecommuting doesn't hinder productivity. Washington State University psychology professor Tahira Probst said via email that research suggests that telecommuting also helps boss-worker relations.

"Telecommuting is associated with significantly higher levels of job satisfaction, lower turnover intentions, reduced role stress, and higher supervisor-ratings of job performance," Probst said.

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• Is telecommuting dead? Don't count on it, experts say
• Work (from home) with us: Tech firms cash in on Yahoo's ban

From Los Angeles to Tampa, shoppers are already camping out in front of big-box retailers, determined to be among the first in line for door-buster deals. 

In Los Angeles, some hardcore consumers have been in line since last Monday, even taking vacation from work in order to save big money. 

An estimated 147 million Americans will take advantage of Black Friday sales, 4 percent more than last year. 

"This year's the earliest I've seen people line up,” said Jeff Cox, the Best Buy manager at a Best Buy store in Los Angeles. “I’m astonished. I've never seen that in my history in retail." 

Why would a person spend 10 days camping out in front of a store? Are the deals really that good? 

"People are like, why come, make a line. You're not saving that much. But we actually are," said Miriam Santamaria, who is proudly first in line at the Best Buy. 

By Friday morning, managers at the L.A. Beat Buy are expecting up to 5,000 people. That explains why Miriam says the worst part about Black Friday is getting out of the parking lot. 

In Tampa, shoppers starting waiting in line over the weekend at a Best Buy, hoping to get their hands on heavily discounted flat-screen TVs and computers. 

Good things come to those who wait. But this may be taking it too far.

Companies that focus on results rather than face time in the office may end up with healthier employees, a new study shows.

When management is more flexible about how and when a job gets done, workers get more sleep and exercise, have the time to make doctors’ appointments and are less likely to come to work sick, according to the study, which was published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

By putting the focus on the end product — whether that is a report or customer satisfaction — the company allows people to make their own schedules, explained the study’s lead author Phyllis Moen, a professor of sociology and McKnight Presidential Endowed Chair at the University of Minnesota. That lowers stress and allows people to better take care of their health, she added.

Moen and her colleagues stumbled on a unique opportunity when they learned that electronics retailer Best Buy was about to switch to a new work structure at its corporate headquarters. And because the company was going to make the switch one department at a time, the researchers would be able to compare workers from the same company — some working under the old structure and some under the new. It was, Moen said, a “natural experiment.”

The new structure was something called ROWE, or Results Only Work Environment.

To see what impact ROWE would have on employee health, Moen and her colleagues asked employees from a department that was about to switch over to ROWE to fill out a series of questionnaires that looked at everything from hours of sleep to whether employees went to the doctor when sick.

The researchers also asked another group of employees — from a department that wasn’t yet slated to change — to fill out the same questionnaires.

Six months later, Moen and her colleagues came back and questioned both groups again. 

They found that employees from the department that had switched to ROWE were getting an hour more sleep each night compared to six months earlier. These workers were also finding more time to exercise and go to the doctor when they were sick. They were also far less likely to show up at work when they came down with a cold or flu.

The group from the department that had maintained status quo showed no such changes in health behaviors.

“Before ROWE, people said they would drag themselves to work no matter what their temperature was,” Moen said. “And they wouldn’t see the doctor. That’s because in [a standard work environment] it’s so important that we be seen as working hard that we don’t even have time to get to the doctor. And that has become a badge of honor.”

So, is this the wave of the future?

Moen thinks it is.

“To be competitive in the global economy employees are going to have to work smarter — and often do the jobs of two or three people,” she explained. “We have to give them greater control over their time so they can get everything done — so they can keep all the balls in the air without dropping them.”

Michael Nagle / Getty Images file

Shoppers look for bargains at Toys "R" Us last year. The big-box chain is opening at 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving this year.

Call it Black Friday fatigue.

With stores racing to open ever earlier on Thanksgiving (Wal-Mart’s doors will open at 10 p.m.!), a backlash is growing, with some retailers and analysts questioning the madness.

“The lunacy of opening at 12 midnight or even earlier on Thanksgiving evening shows that this whole Black Friday thing has run out of legs,” said IDC Retail Insights program director Greg Girard. “Black Friday is a race to the bottom, and it’s just become another ad avenue.”

Other analysts think this year's extended hours are meant to distract shoppers from a lack of exciting inventory.

“If you build it, they will come,” said NPD Group chief industry analyst Marshal Cohen, “but they won’t come in the dead of night. To me, you’re not going to sell more product just because you’re open more hours. It’s more of a smoke screen than it is a solution to the issue.”

This year, some stores are choosing not to take extreme measures to lure in bargain-hungry customers as they kick off a season that is expected to bring in about $465.6 billion in sales, a modest 2.8 percent increase over last year.

Sears, for one, has decided to pass on the trend for midnight openings set by big-box retailers including Best Buy, Kohls and Target. Toys 'R' Us is opening at 9 p.m. Thanksgiving night, an hour ahead of Wal-Mart.

Last year, Sears chose to keep its doors open on Thanksgiving from 7 a.m. until noon, with the idea that shoppers would come in early to rack up a few deals and then head home to their families for a midday meal.

But while the company did have good numbers that day, “The customer feedback was very clear,” said Sears spokesman Tom Aiello. “The customers liked the deals, but they didn’t like the idea of Thanksgiving shorted as a holiday.”

So the chain will revert to its original plan to open at 4 a.m. on Friday. “I think there’s a group of customers that don’t aspire to get up in the middle of the night,” Aiello said.

Retail chain JC Penneyalso decided to stick with a 4 a.m. opening time this year so employees can spend Thanksgiving with friends and family, according to a company spokesman.

Employees at Target and Best Buy have launched petition drives on the website change.org protesting the early openings. “A midnight opening robs the hourly and in-store salary workers of time off with their families on Thanksgiving Day,” wrote petition creator Anthony Hardwick, who identifies himself as a Target employee.

Some local retailers are still undecided on their Black Friday hours and will make last-minute decisions, according to Cohen.

Others are resisting the bonanza that is Black Friday altogether—or at least, they engage in more subtlety. Seattle-based retail chain Nordstrom has avoided opening its doors on Thanksgiving throughout the company’s history and in recent years has posted signs in its stores that read, “One holiday at a time.”

Nordstrom waits until the morning of Black Friday to unveil its Christmas decorations, though it will open doors early that morning in some locations.

“It’s not as in your face,” said Forrester vice president and senior analyst Sucharita Mulpuru, “but there’s a reason that Thanksgiving weekend that people work longer hours and [the stores] pull out all the stops as far as offering sales and promotions—because that’s the nature of that weekend.”

Analyst Greg Girard of IDC said Black Friday is virtually absent from the websites of brand-oriented stores like Gap, Nordstrom and Lord & Taylor.

"And they’re doing something much more surgical in that they’re moving towards direct communications, like text messaging to consumers," he said. "They’re getting to consumers with whom they have a longer lifetime relationship."

Nordstrom, like many higher-end stores, doesn’t rely as heavily on Black Friday to make or break its sales year. Black Friday “is among our most high volume days. But it isn’t our largest sales day of the year, unlike many retailers,” said Nordstrom spokesman Colin Johnson.