New York Times journalists Claire Cain Miller and Catherine Rampell argued that Mayer was “taking on one of the country's biggest workplace issues: whether the ability to work from home, and other flexible arrangements, leads to greater productivity or inhibits innovation and collaboration” (Miller and Rampell, 2013). Comments such as this are common for the articles in the sample. One of the major sub-themes of this category is a preoccupation with the concept of “innovation.” This word appears a staggering seventy times in the sample, and is used in a variety of ways. It is one of the central terms by which we are to make sense of the media’s justification for Mayer’s ban. Understanding how it is used is key to making sense of the news coverage of the telework ban. The term innovation is used to describe the unique product of interaction and
communication that happens spontaneously between coworkers in a collocated work environment and it is thus also used to explain Mayer’s telework ban as being an innovative decision.
In the former manner, innovation in the workplace is considered fundamental to tech industry success, and it is only possible when workers are together, bouncing ideas off each other. The Christian Science Monitor defended Mayer in an op-ed published on February 26th, 2013, arguing that perhaps a new work arrangement was exactly what was
needed to stir creative, innovative ideas at the struggling Internet giant: “Companies rise or fall more quickly than ever based on their ability to generate new services and
products” (Christian Science Monitor, 2013). They even suggested that unhappy workers might soon grow to appreciate the new arrangement, if it works out as Mayer hopes. A story from National Public Radio also from February, 2013 suggested that workplaces can either be flexible, or be “serendipitous,” but they cannot be both at the same time (Noguchi, 2013). Researchers from various disciplines such as occupational psychology and economics have repeatedly found that random interactions and spontaneous
collaboration can lead to unintended positive benefits to workers and their employers (Noguchi, 2013). Innovation in this sense is used to signify the types of new, creative ideas that are needed in order to sustain companies in the highly competitive knowledge economy through particular working conditions.
If you do not have new ideas, then you have a failing tech company—or so goes this logic. As such, banning telework was a business decision for Mayer, a strategy to combat a lack of creativity, increase collaboration, and generate new ideas. As one commentator put it, Mayer “inherited a complete mess” at Yahoo (Weise, 2013). The culture of the company was not conducive to the type of innovation that would make it competitive. Another use of innovation focused on Mayer herself as being tough enough to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth about located working and collaboration, and deploying an innovative, if unpopular, solution. Innovation is the term used to defend Marissa Mayer by arguing that she was going against the grain, trying something new, and taking a much-needed risk. Susan Milligan of US News and World Report called the idea of everyone working face-to-face “refreshingly retro,” arguing that Mayer has forced
us all to confront the reality about the inherent value of collaboration (Milligan, 2013). Banning telework may be “the latest innovation for creating innovation” (Christian Science Monitor, 2013). Articles referred to innovation being “driven,” “produced,” or “created” by clever, yet tough technology company CEOs like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt of Google, and now Marissa Mayer (Cook, 2013).
Mayer’s approach at Yahoo was characterized as “borrowing from the playbook of Google” (Miller and Rampell, 2013). When Mayer left Google, it was the most
successful tech company on the globe, with a number of important perks and policies that ensured happy, productive employees, and a litany of successful, innovative commodities to show for it. When Mayer got to Yahoo, she found low morale, unproductive workers, falling profits, and policies that seemed to be fairly evident contributors to these
problems. She introduced free food in the cafeterias, and handed out free iPhones and Android devices to all her employees in order to boost morale and keep workers on site, policies that were met with a high degree of satisfaction (Miller and Perlroth, 2013).
While Google may not have official decree banning telework like Yahoo now has, their entire philosophy of the workplace was designed to indirectly encourage workers to stay put in the office. The success that Mayer had at Google was often mentioned in the sample articles. According to Michelle Gillet, there are Silicon Valley companies that allowed telework, such as Yahoo and Sun Microsystems, and there are others that do not, such as Google and Facebook. Mayer was brought from Google to Yahoo with the purpose of making the work culture of the latter more like the former. Google is the “vanguard of the hip workplace culture” (The Miami Herald, 2013), while Yahoo was described as “a ship in danger of sinking” (The Times and Transcript, March 5, 2013).
That Mayer was with Google from its inception, being the 20th employee, that she helped create the iconic Google Search page (amongst other popular products), and was the first female engineer to be on staff there, are all-important factors in demonstrating that her role was specifically to bring all of the magic of Google to Yahoo, including the former’s work culture (Gillet, 2013).