A couple years ago, when former Google Inc. executive Marissa Mayer took over as CEO of Yahoo! Inc., there was much to be said about a change of culture that Mayer was going to bring to Yahoo! in hopes of improving the company’s sagging fortunes. Her hiring developed quite a bit of excitement around the company and its stock, as Mayer was highly regarded as one of the few high-ranking female executives at a geeky tech company, and it was believed that she would have the acumenfrom her experience at Google to know how to make Yahoo! an international tech power once again.

[Image courtesy of Dylan from Flickr via a Creative Commons license]Telecommuting from a home office has gotten a bad rep in some business circles, but is the idea of allowing workers to work from home a concept that is being unfairly vilified by some executives? Some new research seems to make some suggestions.

One of the most noteworthy things she did within the first couple of weeks of her arrival was to make a move that she reasoned would improve efficiency of the company – elimitnate working from home, or telecommuting, among employees. The policy was dropped, which pretty much forced every employee at Yahoo! to have to report into an office setting either at headquarters or at one of the satellite locations.

Mayer’s theory went that she believed the common perception that those who worked from home were often not as productive as those who were in an office being constantly observed by supervisors and management. She believed, as others have, that productivity goes down, as thus company losses increase, as more people work from home and do the whole telecommuting thing.

Well, some recent research at Western Uniersity in London, Ontario, seems to be putting a kabosh to that theory. About 2,000 TELUS workers who were either office-bound workers or remote/telecommuting workers were surveyed in several categories, including productivity, leadership and overall satisfaction on the job. The workers rated themselves, and also did “peer reviews” of fellow workers or supervisors. The results, brought forth by researchers at the Ivey School of Business at Western University, said that those who work from home reported having a better work-life balance  and they reported better job satisfaction and being less likely to quit.

And about that theory of being less productive and “slacking” more while away from the office? The research looked into that as well, and noted that there is no significant difference in productivity between office workers and those who worked at home.

So was Ms. Mayer just being a traditional, conventional fuddy-duddy? Or was there something more at play there that we didn’t know? While we might not know the entire reason for the decision she made, if her decision was strictly based on genrally accepted presumptions, then she made an error. However, the Yahoo! company stock has rallied well under hr guidance and the brand has been gaining some traction in consciousness of late. So there is a tendency to think Ms. Mayer knows what she is doing, even when it comes to telecommuting.

But is the concept of telecommuting being unfairly judged as harmful? The latest research joins a growing library of research that seems to suggest that dismissing telecommuting out-of-hand would not be a wise move. Seems that there are some benefits to it that are not always shown on the bottom line, but can be very valuable to a company.

It is at least something to consider.