Working from home: neither working nor home

Katie Roiphe at Slate has a point here: The infiltration of work technology into every corner of our lives is the meat, 'home office' is just the bread. Why wouldn't you want your employees to work remotely, if you think 'work' means 'respond to the items rated as urgent by the person at the other end of your electronic tether'? Really, how is having more places your staff can be made to report from, particularly places you don't even fund, a bad thing? Framed that way, remote officing is feudal. And it can be. At SJN Sales, we make a point of hiring only qualified self-starters. If you need to be contacted every 90 minutes, or reminded every 15, about your task list, you're not a fit here. We do engage in some structural design tricks to keep everyone on the job and producing, but we can't achieve anything moderately interesting, let alone strive for the extraordinary, when executive time is being used on task management. Best of luck to Yahoo! in getting the market to reward their offloading of staff. Meanwhile, if you're productive working from a home office part-time, we're always hiring.