After several days of intense international discussion about its new policy against working remotely, Yahoo is trying to distance itself from the controversy. 
 
 The company issued a statement to the New York Times in which it drew a line between the situation at Yahoo and flexible work policies in the rest of the economy: 
 
 “This isn’t a broad industry view on working from home," the statement said. "This is about what is right for Yahoo right now.” 
 
 Yahoo issued its new ban on remote work last week. The company's goal, which many insiders support, was to foster more camaraderie, intensity, and creativity from physical interaction while also eliminating some workers who had effectively retired on the job. 
 
 The ban understandably caused some grumbling from Yahoos who had joined the company precisely because they were allowed to work remotely. And then it spawned a world-wide debate in which everyone from Richard Branson to mommy bloggers weighed in. 
 
 Outside Yahoo, most observers felt that CEO Marissa Mayer's decision had set back the cause of flexible work policies and work-life balance, especially for women. Inside Yahoo, meanwhile, many applauded the move. If Yahoo is to get its mojo back, these folks argued, it needs a renewed sense of commitment from everyone on the team. 
 
 In any event, now, several days later, Yahoo has weighed in on the remote-work ban again, presumably seeking to dampen the criticism it has received. But, to her credit, Yahoo's new CEO, Marissa Mayer, is not backing down. 
 
 If nothing else, the controversy once again demonstrates Mayer's leadership abilities. For the past decade, Yahoo has been in desperate need of a CEO who is willing to set a high bar and make the tough, unpopular decisions necessary to whip the company back into shape. 
 
 In her short tenure at Yahoo, Mayer has demonstrated that she is more than capable of doing that. 
 
 SEE ALSO: Yahoos Actually Support Marissa Mayer's Ban On Remote Work 
 
 Disclosure: I work for Yahoo, as a part-time host of a Yahoo Finance show called Daily Ticker. I like working for Yahoo, and I would prefer to keep working for Yahoo, so if I felt like grumbling about a decision Yahoo made, I probably wouldn't do it here. I am also a Yahoo shareholder (a relic of my Internet exuberance in the late 1990s). ||||| As befits a chief executive hired with explicit orders to disrupt a company's stagnating culture, Marissa Mayer met with a great deal of criticism this weekend when word leaked that Yahoo employees would no longer be allowed to telecommute. 
 
 In the words of Jackie Reses, head of human resources for the company: 
 
 To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together. 
 
 You can imagine the outrage. An Internet company, disconnected? What kind of perverse strategy into the future is this? 
 
 But I hear you, Ms. Mayer. And I don't disagree. 
 
 Culture change 
 
 By my best estimation, Marissa Mayer is trying to infuse her new company with much of the same attitude that her previous employer, Google, is famous for. After years of unsuccessful incremental change, Yahoo surely needs it. 
 
 And what is that attitude, exactly? According to various Googlers I know, it's what Yahoo was in its heyday: a place where the brightest minds on the Internet convened to create and innovate. Today, Google is a place built on deep benches of talent, round-the-clock hard work and a good deal of freedom. It succeeds because it (usually) throws the best resources it has at a project, and those resources don't need oversight to keep on it with ardent fervor. For all of Google's reported internecine issues -- fiefdoms of creativity that don't talk to each other -- the one thing you can't say about that company's various teams is that they are content with the status quo. 
 
 Contrast that with Yahoo, which like many mature Internet companies has seen malaise set in as it maintains existing businesses, rather than pursuing new ones. 
 
 The issue that sparks this latest debate, of course, is telework. Both Google and Yahoo are among the companies that have embraced connectivity as a way to free its employees from their desks, even as they spend lavishly on open plan offices designed to attract workers in the first place. For Mayer to turn her back on this concept is an affront to the dot-com dynamic, even if it affects by my rough estimate approximately five percent of the company's workforce. 
 
 Much of the subsequent coverage of the decision has framed telework as a right to be taken away, rather than a privilege to be relinquished. "Even waiting for the cable guy is questionable," Kara Swisher writes with a bit of glee. It's not that simple. 
 
 Telecommuting: triumphs vs. troubles 
 
 There is a considerable amount of consternation around how to manage teams of information workers in an age of globalization (your best engineers might not live here) and shifting cultural expectations (your best engineers might be new parents). There does not seem to be consensus on the issue -- some decry distributed workforces as collaboratively ineffective; others decry the physical office as a nest of distraction. There is truth to both. (There's a great Hacker News thread from last month expanding on this.) 
 
 The best take on the subject I've read comes from Red Hat's Bob McWhirter, who suggests that it's an all-or-nothing proposition that is defined more by how you work than where you are. And if you're a remote worker for a largely centralized, localized team, well, you'll be working twice as hard to keep in the loop. Telework: it's not a matter of geography, it's a matter of communication. If you're doing it wrong, there's a good chance it's ruining everything. 
 
 We can all agree that Yahoo is not great at communication. (Let us not forget that this is the company that fired Mayer's predecessor, Carol Bartz, by phone.) To get Yahoo on the right track, then, change begins with the very means by which its employees work together. Mayer isn't saying distributed workforces don't work. She isn't even saying telecommuting doesn't work. She's just saying that remote workers don't work -- certainly not for centralized Yahoo, certainly not right now. It is easier to ask a small minority of staff to return to the office than ask the majority to go home and never come back. 
 
 That's a bitter pill for Yahoo veterans to swallow, of course, particularly the ones who were hired with promises of flexibility in this regard. FedEx packages will soon be re-routed to the office. Childcare services will be on speed dial. And a handful of employees will invariably quit in frustration, because Yahoo's new path suddenly no longer aligns with their own. 
 
 That's OK. You can't please everyone all the time. "[The decision] is outrageous and a morale killer," an unnamed employee tells Swisher in her report. That couldn't be more wrong. It is alienation and isolation -- as well as the turf wars and resentment that result -- that are culture-sapping morale killers. Leaving this kind of thing to fester in your organization as a newly-hired CEO? That is the true outrage. 
 
 Look at it another way: Mayer would not have made such a decision if it weren't a problem. It is more expensive -- to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars -- for Yahoo to provide a workstation for every single employee in the urban hubs in which it operates. 
 
 As a member of a distributed team who is typing these words from his couch at home, I feel for the affected employees; I do. But Mayer's (rather undesirable) task is to put the interests of the whole ahead of the interests of the individual. Her ultimate goal is to crush complacency in an 18-year-old Internet company without an identity. You can't fault her for that. ||||| Photo by Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images 
 
 Elsewhere in Slate, Katie Roiphe makes the case against working from home. 
 
 It was nearly a decade ago that I stopped going into the office every day. I worked at a competing Web magazine at the time, and my bosses didn’t really care how I worked, as long as I got stuff done. At first, like many people, I began working from home because I was lazy. By skipping my hourlong commute, I gave myself more time to sleep in and goof off. And without anyone watching over me, the goofing off was sure to be epic. 
 
 But I quickly realized that, counter to my intentions, working at home made me more productive. Without office distractions—listening to other people’s phone calls, bantering with the receptionist, figuring out where and with whom to go to lunch—I could report and write much faster. Telecommuting also freed me from pointless office commitments. For instance, I could call in to meetings, mute my line, and then do more important things with my time. 
 
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 When I tell people that I work at home, they usually assume one of two things—that I’m un- or underemployed and just biding my time until I get a real job, or that I possess a monkish, single-minded devotion to work that they suggest is required for successful telecommuting. Neither is true. Instead, I’ve realized that, once you learn how to do it, working at home is superior in almost every way. It allows me to be better at my job and at my life—to be a more productive employee and a not-terrible husband and dad. 
 
 Get Slate in your inbox. 
 
 Working at home isn’t for everyone. As a writer, I work according to what Y Combinator’s Paul Graham calls the “maker’s schedule.” My job requires long stretches of distraction-free time, and my output, on any particular day, is sensitive to my mood and environment. Working at home gives me the freedom to adjust these variables to maximum effect: Sometimes I find that I write better if I start a column after dinner, while other times I hit a wall during the middle of the day, take an hour off to get a snack and jump in the shower, and then come back to produce a magnificent column about pajamas. 
 
 You might work differently. Maybe your mind is best primed by conversations with your co-workers about Downton Abbey. That’s fine. The point—and this is hardly groundbreaking—is that different people work differently. Any organization whose success depends on maximizing its workers’ productivity ought to allow their employees some degree of flexibility. 
 
 That brings us to Yahoo’s ridiculous new ban on working from home. Last week, All Things D’s Kara Swisher reported that Marissa Mayer, the beleaguered Web company’s new CEO, will force Yahoo’s few hundred remote workers to relocate to its offices. In a memo Swisher obtained, the company’s human-resources chief allows workers to “occasionally” stay home to “wait for the cable guy,” but otherwise requires people—I’m sorry, “Yahoos”—to submit to “the interactions and experiences that are only possible in our offices.” Because this was an HR memo and therefore freed from any requirement to be truthful, it went on to declare that “speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home.” It added: “We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.” (I asked Yahoo to explain the policy to me, and a spokeswoman responded with this brief statement: “We don't discuss internal matters. This isn't a broad industry view on working from home—this is about what is right for Yahoo!, right now.") 
 
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 Mayer is going to regret this decision. It’s myopic, unfriendly, and so boneheaded that I worry it’s the product of spending too much time at the office. (She did, after all, build a nursery next to her office to house her new baby). It’s not just that the policy completely elides the virtues of working from home. Numerous studies have found that people can be more productive when they’re allowed to work away from the office. One, released this month by researchers at Stanford, showed that when Chinese call-center employees were allowed to work from home, their performance increased by 13 percent. Considering such gains, it’s likely that Yahoo’s new ban will force remote workers to alter their work lives in a way that will lower their productivity. It will also put Yahoo at odds with just about every other tech company in Silicon Valley—firms that don’t impose such rules on working from home, and with whom Yahoo competes for talent. 
 
 Illustration by Robert Neubecker 
 
 The larger problem with the ban is its apparent cluelessness about how creative work occurs. Marissa Mayer is said to be a devoted office worker. Both her admirers and critics call her a workaholic, a woman who’s gotten ahead not just through talent but also by working longer hours than most other people. Yahoo is a Web and media company, a firm teeming with engineers, designers, writers, and editors—people whose work not only can be accomplished remotely, but also people who may find working at home to be a better way to get things done. This decision suggests that Mayer doesn’t understand one of the most basic ideas about managing workers—that different people work in different ways, and that some kinds of pursuits are inhibited, rather than improved, by time in the office. 
 
 The working-from-home ban also reveals that Mayer doesn’t know how to measure her workers’ performance. Swisher quotes a source who says that Mayer has been “irked about Yahoo parking lots that are slow to fill in the morning and quick to empty by 5 p.m.” This is a classic bad-manager misconception—that a full parking lot means people are getting stuff done. And it’s easy for employees to game that system. If my boss makes it clear that she’s looking for my car in the parking lot in the evenings and on weekends, all I’ve got to do to get noticed is spend a lot of time at the office. Sure, this will ruin the rest of my life, but otherwise it’s easy—as long as I’m in the office, even if I’m just playing solitaire, I know I’ll be making a good impression. 
 
 By contrast, allowing workers to work from anywhere pushes managers to look at more important measurements of productivity. As David Fullerton, the vice president of engineering at the Web firm Stack Exchange, explained in a recent blog post extolling the virtues of remote working, “As a manager, I can’t easily know how many hours each person on my team is working. This is actually good for me because it forces me to look at what they’ve done.” 
 
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 One theory behind Yahoo’s office-only policy is that it’s an effort to combat the firm’s bloat; the firm, one ex-Yahoo told Business Insider, has been beset by people who claim to be working remotely but just don’t ever get things done. But if that’s the case, then why use this blunt instrument? Why not just fire the people who aren’t doing their work? 
 
 One last thing: Yahoo’s HR memo defends its working-from-home ban by pointing to the improvement in “collaboration and communication” that stems from being in the office. This is a reference to a long line of research pointing to the benefits of propinquity—when people from different disciplines interact with one another, they come up with brilliant ideas together. (See Jonah Lehrer’s New Yorker piece explaining the research behind this theory; despite the author’s disgrace, the research still looks pretty solid.) 
 
 Yahoo’s memo seems to suggest there’s a tension between the productivity gains to be had from remote working and the collaborative spirit fostered by people in close proximity to one another. But that doesn’t have to be the case. Companies with flexible policies can allow people to work at home a few days a week and from the office on other days. Modern communications technologies can also help. For instance, telepresence robots like the Beam and Anybot allow home workers to move a robotic avatar through a faraway office. People who work using these technologies have told me that they allow for offsite workers to interact with their colleagues very naturally. The more you use it, the more you feel like you’re really there.
– Marissa Mayer's recently announced ban on telecommuting at Yahoo has caused quite a brouhaha; now, the company is responding. "This isn’t a broad industry view on working from home," the firm says in a statement issued yesterday, per the New York Times. "This is about what is right for Yahoo right now." That was essentially the extent of its comments, but the Times also spoke with Yahoo workers who say a number of employees are slacking. (Earlier reports noted that Mayer had grown frustrated with employees who trickled in and left right at 5pm.) Requiring them to show up at the office could restore some enthusiasm—and allow the company to monitor the situation. Indeed, some telecommuters have even started their own companies while working from home on Yahoo's dime, the workers say. Some employees might quit, but the company would prefer to lose the dead wood. Meanwhile, at Business Insider, Henry Blodget—who works part-time for Yahoo—comes to Mayer's defense. "For the past decade, Yahoo has been in desperate need of a CEO who is willing to set a high bar and make the tough, unpopular decisions necessary to whip the company back into shape," he writes. "Mayer has demonstrated that she is more than capable of doing that."