BY ALAN GATHRIGHT
Mercury News Staff Writer
The Silicon Valley workplace
is becoming the modern
village, church and corner
tavern rolled into one as tech workers toil
longer and harder in a grueling
race against ``Internet time.''
Nowhere is that truer than at
Yahoo Inc., the Internet
portal-turned-global media
empire, where twentysomething kids speak with
missionary devotion about the
shared kinship, creative energy and
plain fun of a workplace community
that's ``shaping the future of
society.''
Like nearly half of all respondents
to the Mercury News
poll who work in high technology,
many Yahoos -- as the Santa Clara
company's employees call themselves
-- agree their workplace is
their central community.
`Most of my friends now are
people who work at Yahoo.
When you're working so much
. . . you kind of lose your other
social life,'' said Erin Moore,
26, who is the ``Voice of Yahoo'' on the firm's
phone mail and a producer for
Yahoo Shopping's toy store.
``You work really hard, and
you're here really late,
but because you're with the
people you like . . . you don't realize, `Wow!
It's 10 p.m. Where did that
day go?' '' said Moore, who lives with two
Yahoo co-workers.
But the Yahoo community is not
one of monastic,
work-crazed nerds, walled off
from the world. Bright and well-rounded, the
Yahoos describe their workplace
community as a tree, branching into the
wider world.
When they're not making Net
breakthroughs, they're
donating stock and volunteering
on community
projects through the Yahoo
Employee Foundation.
Yahoo employees adopted San
Jose's Lester
Shields Elementary School.
Volunteers
helped clean up campus before
the school year
began and assist as classroom
and sports
mentors twice monthly. The
students repaid the
support by coming toYahoo to
sing Christmas
carols and decorate trees and
hallways with Santa
art.
Yahoo workers play on company
softball, soccer
and frisbee teams together.
``A group of us here are getting
together an a
cappella group, because we're
just here and so . . . it was easy after work to
just to stick around for another
hour,'' said Dan
Sroka, 32, a creative director
in Yahoo's brand-marketing department.
``How do you meet people in
your (outside) community if you want to start an a
cappella group? It's kind of
hard. Do you put an ad
in the paper? Here, you just
walk around and say, `Hey,
you sing too?' ''
Workplace culture
As Yahoo grew from four employees
to 1,800 in five
years, its leaders fostered
a community bound
by friendly camaraderie and
focused teamwork that,
experts say, epitomizes a highly
effective
workplace culture.
``Culture, in a word, is community,''
British
organizational behavior professors
Rob Goffee and
Gareth Jones wrote in a 1996
Harvard Business Review
article. ``Like families, villages,
schools and
clubs, businesses . . . are
built on shared interests
and mutual obligations and
thrive on cooperation
and friendships.''
Rank-and-file Yahoos speak of
their ``ownership'' in
the firm's success, the excitement
of working
with bright young peers and
a passionate devotion to
pioneering Internet advances
reshaping the
world.
Yahoo leaders strive to retain
a start-up's quick
reflexes and underdog scrappiness
by
organizing around small, enterprising
teams.
To spur collaboration, all
employees --
including executives -- work
in cubicles where
fertile ideas are shouted ``over
the wall.''
Management rejects rigid policies
and titles (the
founders are called ``Chief
Yahoos'').
``I definitely feel that
in every aspect, Yahoo
encourages independent thinking,''
said
Shannon Gallagher, 28, a Web
surfer who
tracks new Net sites. ``I've
only been here
nine months, and yet I feel
completely open to
put my ideas on the table to
people who've
been here four-plus years.''
Yahoo seems part extended family,
part college
dorm.
The lobby is filled with Pee
Wee's Playhouse-style
oversize purple and yellow
furniture, and
co-workers stop to chat about
weekend plans while
snacking at a reception counter
stocked with
Tootsie Pops, Altoids mints
and the Wall Street
Journal. A coffee table next
to the Christmas tree bears
family photo albums with snapshots
of people cutting
loose at the annual YEP (Year
End Party),
decked out as Halloween goblins
or picnicking at one of
Yahoo's spring-summer ``Lunch
on the
Green'' outdoor feasts with
live music.
Yahoo's roots
This playfully intense atmosphere
isn't surprising.
Before Yahoo was big business,
it was a blast.
The firm started as the
obsessive hobby of two Stanford
doctoral candidates -- Jerry
Yang and David
Filo -- who began categorizing
favorite Web sites on an
Internet search engine in their
cramped
trailer-office. As a frenzy
of friends and then
strangers demanded more, Yahoo
mushroomed into one
of the two most popular Net
``portals'' -- a gateway to
million visitors each month.
The success has sent Yahoo stock
soaring, making Yang
and Filo billionaires and many
early
employees multimillionaires.
If Yahoo's employees were
to cash in all of their stock
options, they'd
reap at least $2 billion, according
to one analysis.
Yet, like nearly 60 percent
of the high-tech workers
surveyed, many at Yahoo say
their work is more
important than the money they
earn.
Self-driven
Not surprisingly, Yahoo employees
say they often burn
the midnight oil, like the
52 percent of the
poll's respondents employed
in high technology who work
50 or more hours a week. But
Yahoos
insist that the work pace fluctuates
and no one drives
them like themselves.
``My well-being and my happiness
is directly
proportional to the number
of hours I work,'' said
Michael Haswell, 27, a Yahoo
in-house attorney who
works up to 90 hours in ``a
heavy week.''
Fueled by the ``adrenaline rush''
of cutting-edge
projects, Haswell admits: ``I
really take on as much
as I can . . . and Yahoo gives
me a lot of freedom.''
While Yahoo encourages vacations,
Haswell said during
his nearly two years there
he's only squeezed
in a 10-day holiday, which
included a bar association
conference. ``I made it three
or four days before
I just had to log on and check
e-mail,'' he said.
As an antidote to the
24-hour, ``Always Live!''
pressures of Internet life,
workers unwind with
late-night indoor mountain-bike
races and soccer
matches, and daily foosball
tournaments in the
cafeteria. The firm hires
a ``party princess'' to plan
regular celebrations.
To counter the work stress that
59 percent of high-tech
workers say they take home,
Yahoo
encourages workers to decompress
by subsidizing gym
memberships and holding team
``fitness
``I've told my boss, `You need
to get out of here,' ''
said Joe Streng, 31, who produces
live online
events.
Hooked on innovation
Streng says it's Yahoo's atmosphere
of free-wheeling
innovation that keeps him and
his wife -- a
fellow Yahoo -- commuting three
hours round trip from
their Walnut Creek home. Streng
recalled his
former job as a San Francisco
TV station producer where
a boss warned him management
felt he
wasn't working hard enough
because ``you have too much
fun.''
``I thought to myself . . .
I don't want to be working
for a company that sees that
as a negative,'' he
said. ``When you come here,
where being fun and
creative and outgoing is encouraged
and a sign that
you're doing a great job .
. . boy, that's powerful
stuff.''
Contact Alan Gathright at agathright@sjmercury.com
or
(650) 364-4750.
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