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.

Related content:

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

Maybe Yahoo should have done its homework before banning work-at-home.

For millions of American companies large and small, telecommuting has become a critical force in boosting worker productivity and growing profits in the information age.

Take the case of Dallas-based Ryan, LLC, the seventh largest corporate tax services firm in the U.S., with more than 900 employees in 45 locations in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. In August 2008, the company realized it had a problem. Voluntary turnover was roughly 20 percent. Some employees who quit said the long hours at the office left them little time for a personal life.

“We had a policy that required people to be physically present,” said Delta Emerson, the company’s chief of staff. “If you were not seen, you were questioned as to whether or not you were working.”

The solution: a flexible work schedule that allowed employees to work remotely and set their own hours. Though the transition had its bumps, the results were surprising.

Not only did the work all get done, the company became even more productive. Revenues went up. Client satisfaction went up. And turnover went down.

Emerson said the lesson was that there’s more to productivity than just showing up at the office. Ryan workers know that their job performance is now being measured on how much work they get done, not how reliably they show up at the office, she said.

“Everyone knows what they have to do to cut it,” said Emerson. “But people treasure this flexibility to the point that they will give their all to continue to work in an environment that allows that.”

By focusing more on measuring how well employees are doing their job, and worrying less about where the work gets done, companies with flexible work policies are seeing productivity go up, according to human resources experts.

That may be one more reason American companies are adopting flexible work policies. As of last year, nearly two-thirds of employers offered flexible work rules to at least some of their employees – up from about a third in 2005, according to a national study by the Society for Human Resource Management.

“We don’t see this trend going away,” said Michael Aitken, SHRM’s vice president of government affairs. "This is the way that work will get done in the future. I spend a great deal of time and energy in educating our members about the value that it offers.”

But old perceptions about the distractions of the home office persist. In her now widely-read memo explaining why Yahoo now forbids its employees to work from home, CEO Marissa Mayer explained that “speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home.”

The vast majority of companies who support flexible work practices, however, disagree. Employees who take advantage of telecommuting and other flexible policies often are more productive than if they worked only at the office, according to SHRM research. Some 97 percent of human resources managers at companies with those policies said that productivity is “the same or better” than with office-only work rules.

By skipping the travel time required to get to the office, telecommuting boosts the number of productive hours each employee can devote to work. In a 2010 study, American Consumer Institute economists Joseph Fuhr and Stephen Pociask calculated that roughly 1.7 trillion minutes are spent commuting every year – at a cost in lost work time and transportation expenses of roughly 7.2 percent of U.S. gross domestic product.

The economic benefits of expanding telecommuting could be huge. The authors estimate that, over 10 years, a 10 percent increase in telecommuting hours would save nearly $100 billion in lost time and expense.

We would all also breathe a little easier. Fuhr and Pociask calculated that by saving 4.4 billion gallons of gasoline, along with the energy savings from reduced office space, a 10 percent increase in hours worked form home over the next decade would reduce greenhouse gas emission by more than half a billion tons of carbon dioxide.

To be sure, not all occupations are well-suited to telecommuting. Waiters and barge pilots aren’t ever going to be very productive working from a home office. But as more occupations become tied to a computer screen for much of the day, it matters less where that screen is situated.

As many home office workers can attest, some work is better performed in a group setting – especially dull, menial tasks where the urge to goof-off and ready distractions are ever present.

That was also the conclusion of a 2012 study by economist Glenn Dutcher at the University of Innsbruck, who found that while telecommuting “has a positive impact on productivity of creative tasks” it has a “negative impact on productivity of dull tasks.” So if your job involves a lot of copying and collating, you’ll probably get more done chatting with co-workers while visiting the water cooler in the copy room.

Mayer also cited those kind of chance encounters in defense of her “everyone back to the office” mandate.

“Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings,” she wrote.

From TODAY: KLG sticks up for Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer

But for every serendipitous encounter that sparks the creation of a winning new product, there are many hours wasted sitting in someone else’s unproductive meeting or listening to a cube neighbor justify their picks in the Oscars pool, said Aitken.

“(Telecommuting) allows for less interruption at the office,” he said. “No people swinging by and wanting to talk about what happened over the weekend.”

And while detractors argue that a home office present too many productivity-killing distractions, workers who telecommute are better able to juggle their work and home lives. That helps reduce absenteeism.

“I may want to go to a doctor’s appointment or pick up the dry cleaning or go to my son or daughter’s school play,” said Aitken. “Telecommuting allows that worker the peace of mind to be able to do the things they may need to do for their life side and still meet their work obligations.”

Supporters of flexible work policies say the key to making the transition work is the development of better ways to measure how well their employees are doing. Being the first in the parking lot in the morning and the last to leave at night usually has little to do with how much actual work gets done in between.

“We used to measure people based on hours worked, and the person who worked the most hours was like a hero,” said Emerson. “There was frequently no tie-in related to what else they had done. So people who put in the hours could get away with a lot. Now, we don’t even pay attention to hours anymore. We’re looking at results.”

Related story:

Hey Marissa! Working from home is alive and well

Updated 12:00 p.m. ET - Silicon Valley firms are known for cushy perks: free food, bringing your dog to work and so on. But starting in June, Yahoo employees will lose the benefit of working from home. According to an internal memo leaked on Friday to The Wall Street Journal's AllThingsD.com by numerous disgruntled Yahoo employees, the new policy calls for workers “physically being together.”

“We need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices... Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home,” reads the memo from Jacqueline Reses, a private equity veteran brought on board by Mayer in September to be the company’s HR boss.

“Hiring, managing and incentivizing talent will be of key importance,” Reses said in the press release announcing her hire.

Although Yahoo beat Wall Street expectations and reported an increase in revenue last month, this recent good news follows a long stretch of poor performance and management turmoil. Some have speculated that Yahoo’s no-telecommuting policy could be a defensive move, a way to lower the embattled tech giant’s headcount without undertaking formal layoffs. 

Shortly after CEO Marissa Mayer took the helm in July, she implemented changes like free lunch, free phones and other perks reminiscent of her former employer, Google. Earlier this month, a Business Insider list of top U.S. employers ranked Yahoo eighth, behind second-place Google but ahead of Microsoft, which came in 14th.

This new policy might make holding onto that spot harder. It drew a scathing response on Twitter and blog comment threads, with many users saying that keeping a stable of unproductive workers is a management failure, and that the policy would prompt a brain drain. (A handful of smaller tech companies used the news as a chance to recruit, inviting frustrated Yahoo! employees to come work — on a flexible schedule — for them instead.)

Others defended Mayer, saying an all-hands-on-deck approach was the only way to keep the company's new momentum going.

In her short stint at Yahoo, this isn’t the first time Mayer’s work-life balance choices have been criticized. After giving birth to her first child last fall, Mayer planned to be back at work in only a week or two.

Carley Roney, co-founder of the parent company for TheBump.com, told TODAY that Yahoo!’s policy change could convey an “anti-parent” sentiment. Yahoo did not respond to the question of whether new mom Mayer sometimes works from home. "We don't comment on rumors or internal matters," a company spokeswoman said via email.

The Yahoo memo made it clear that workers shouldn’t expect a lot of wiggle room or exceptions. “For the rest of us who occasionally have to stay home for the cable guy, please use your best judgment in the spirit of collaboration,” Reses said.

Studies that have tried to determine whether working from home helps or hurts productivity have drawn mixed conclusions. A study in June by Wakefield Research found that 43 percent of people said they watched TV while “working” from home, and roughly a quarter each admitted to taking a nap or knocking back a drink on the clock.

But a paper published just last week out of Stanford University said performance increased 13 percent when employees of a Chinese travel agency were allowed to work from home on a trial basis. “[A]bout 9 percent was from working more minutes per shift (fewer breaks and sick-days) and 4 percent from more calls per minute (attributed to a quieter working environment),” researchers wrote. When the company ended the trial and extended the work-from-home option to the rest of its people, performance rose 22 percent.

What's more, there is a correlation between working from home and higher pay. Census Bureau data released last year found that part-time telecommuters earned a median $22,800 more than those who physically go to work every day.

A Bureau of Labor Statistics report published in June found that telework is making inroads into the American labor market, albeit slowly. About a quarter of survey respondents said they worked from home at least some of the time.

“Evidence also reveals that an increasing number of jobs in the American economy could be performed at home if employers were willing to allow employees to do so,” researchers wrote. Technology-related jobs were mentioned as top prospects for telework. Hurdles, when they existed, tended to stem from management reluctance rather than technological limitations.

Based on the BLS’s findings, though, Mayer’s new edict could be a blessing in disguise for Yahoo workers. Working from home “is not unequivocally helpful in reducing work-family conflicts,” the report said. “Instead, telecommuting appears to have become instrumental in the general expansion of work hours... and/or the ability of employers to increase or intensify work demands among their salaried employees.”

More: Marissa Mayer: Being mom and CEO 'takes a lot of focus'
The new Yahoo! design: What's changed?
What to expect when he's expecting
The Marissa Mayer club: Starting a new job pregnant

People who work from home some of the time tend to make more money than people who work exclusively at home or at the office, according to new data from the Census Bureau.

The median annual earnings for people who worked at home at least one day a week but also worked at a job site was $52,800 in 2010, compared with $25,500 for people who worked at home exclusively and $30,000 for people who always work onsite, the Census Bureau found.

The data come as more people are working from home at least some of the time. About 9.5 percent of workers, or about 13.4 million people, worked from home at least some of the time in 2010. That was up from 9.5 million people, or 7.8 percent of all workers, in 1999, the Census Bureau reported.

"Mixed" workers who work both at home and in an office are generally affluent, with median household income of $96,300, according to census data. That compares with median household income of $74,000 for people who always work at home and $65,600 for people who always work onsite, the researchers reported.

Nearly half of the people who worked at home exclusively were self-employed, but experts say there are other explanations for why those who work from home make less. 

Some employers are finding that especially among younger workers, the ability to work at home and forgo a grueling commute is such a beneficial perk that they are willing to accept a lower starting salary in exchange for it.

“They’re placing more emphasis on certain aspects of work/life balance,” said Lisa Calicchio, vice president of recruitment and talent services for Covance, a drug development company based in Princeton, N.J.

Calicchio – who happened to be working from home when she spoke to TODAY – said her company has become more accepting of telecommuting among people who don’t do manufacturing or other work that requires a physical presence.

Flexibility can be a great recruitment tool in the traffic-clogged Northeast because it saves employees the headaches that come with commuting, and it also can save employers money on real estate.

Although she only works from home on occasion, Calicchio said plenty of staffers are exclusively working offsite. The company uses a variety of communication tools to keep in touch, and Calicchio said she encourages them to be proactive about phoning and e-mailing their managers just to stay in the loop.

Still, those phone calls are no replacement for face time, and Calicchio said it can be a challenge for managers to accept that their workers are getting the job done even when they can’t be seen.

The reality, she said, is that many offsite workers outperform because they are so grateful to be skipping commute.

“It’s kind of the honor system,” she said. “It keeps them honest. It keeps them thankful.”

In fact, research shows that people who work at home tend to work harder to prove they are just as productive as if their boss were sitting across from them, said Ellen Ernst Kossek, a professor at Michigan State University.

Some of those workers – particularly the ones who work at home occasionally – could easily be classified as overworkers. They are the ones for whom the convenience of the home office leads to what she calls “job creep” as work seeps into nights, weekends and vacation time.

The corollary to that is “family creep,” when at-home workers find themselves doing child care, laundry and other duties while also trying to finish their work. That’s another problem some companies and workers face.

In general, Kossek – who also was working at home when she spoke with TODAY – is a fan of telecommuting. But she said companies need to provide cultural support to help telecommuters excel at their jobs while dealing with practical issues such as technical problems. And they need to shell out the money to bring virtual workers together at least occasionally.

Her research has shown that the system works best when people have a mix of home and office time.

But she added that working at home can limit your ability to get ahead and can lead to big communication problems.

In one case, she said, a student of hers went to work for a company and was required to work in the office while boss telecommuted.

One of her first tasks, which she had to perform without the physical presence of her manager, was to lay people off.

“She was extremely depressed,” Kossek said.

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.”

Getty Images stock

Telecommuting parents have little chance to escape the messy world of parenting, a new study suggests.

If you’re considering telecommuting to salve your stress from the constant juggling of work and family, think again.

A new study shows that “telework” takes a toll on the very employees who might desire this option most — those who feel especially torn between job responsibilities and family. For these people, the more hours spent working at home, the higher the risk of burnout, according to the report, published in the Journal of Business and Psychology.

That’s because when job and family are in the same place, some workers feel there is no chance for downtime —no respite or time to relax, said Timothy Golden, an associate professor of management at the Lally School of Management and Technology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

“A teleworker may feel conflict more because you’re being constantly reminded of your home role: whether it’s what you need to do as a parent or household chores,” Golden said. “And that can make exhaustion worse."

Golden surveyed 316 employees from a large computer company that allows workers to  telecommute and to work with a flexible time schedules.

To ferret out the level of job/family conflict, Golden asked employees to rate on a scale of 1 to 5 how strongly they agreed with statements such as, “My work keeps me from my family activities more than I would like,” “Due to pressures at work, sometimes when I am at home I am too stressed to do the things I enjoy,” “The time I spend on family responsibilities often interferes with my work responsibilities,” and “ Because I am often stressed from family responsibilities, I have a hard time concentrating on my work.”

Golden also surveyed the employees about their level of exhaustion. Study volunteers were asked to rate on a scale of 1-5 how strongly they agreed with statements such as, “I feel emotionally drained by my work.”

Telecommuting was a boon to workers who felt little or no conflict between work and family. But those who were the most torn between home and work responsibilities showed increasing levels of exhaustion as hours spent teleworking rose.

Still, Golden said,  even among those who feel strong conflict, telecommuting can be a good choice if it’s done right. That means having clear boundaries, both mental and physical — such as a door to one’s home office — between work and family.

“Telework, if it’s done well, can be very beneficial,” he added. “You save time commuting. You don’t have to deal with the stress of being delayed on your way to work because of traffic or weather. You have the comfort of working where you want to. But you have to think ahead of time about what might impact you if you’re working from home.”