You may have heard about Yahoo's new rule forbidding employees from working full or part-time from home. They must actually commute to the office instead of the kitchen table. The edict has caused a lot of chatter in office break rooms around the country mostly because people are actually in their break rooms and able to chatter about it. Isolated folks who work from home are not happy but all they can do is tweet-n'-text. Not good enough.
Some background first: most of us got the no-home office news from a 20-second reader on the news without much explanation as to the WHY of it all. Sounded kind of harsh to many. "Speed and quality is often sacrificed when we work from home," the memo reads. "We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together."
This is one of those deals where a little more than a 20-second sound bite helps. If you go online and read the actual memo, understanding begins to dawn. "Communication and collaboration will be important so we need to be working side-by-side....Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings." Ya think?
Whether she knows it, or not, Yahoo's CEO Marissa Mayer has tapped into a relatively new concept of human behavior that's capturing the imagination of some behavioral scientists. It goes by the name of 'mentaliztion,' a squishy but interesting word that means the ability to read and make sense of other people's social cues by voice tone, facial expressions and how to respond to them. Some psychologists believe mentalization is the core of our emotional and social intelligence.
Need proof? Research out of Stanford says that 93 percent of what an audience gets from the speaker is the speaker him/herself, leaving 7 percent for the wonderfully crafted words we chose. That means YOU, your attitude, demeanor, facial expression, body language -- all of the external factors -- account for the primary communications between speaker and listener.
Let's call it 3D communication. And you can't really get that from 140 characters or an email no matter what kind of :-( you use.