Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s new chief executive, has caused consternation by insisting that employees who have worked from home must in future come to the office. Her critics have pointed out that home workers are as productive, if not more so, as those in cubicles.
They are, however, missing the point. Ms Mayer is mostly doing this as a rough and ready way to reform Yahoo’s notoriously dysfunctional and disorganised culture. She is also doing it because she can.
The lesson to draw from Ms Mayer’s whip-cracking – in Silicon Valley, of all places – is that this is an age of harder work. From intense teamwork at the top to monitoring and surveillance at the bottom, managers are squeezing more from employees than they previously would have dared.