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Yahoo’s end to working from home may backfire
Over at Slate, Matthew Yglesias suggests that Yahoo president Marissa Mayer may not be against working from home per se, but is attempting to cleanly lay off low productivity workers:
You think you have some reason to believe that the full-time workers from home on the Yahoo staff are a disproportionately low-productivity cohort. Announcing this new policy becomes a way of reducing the size of the staff without throwing everyone into a panic about layoffs and cost-cutting and oh-my-god-should-I-be-looking-for-a-new-job-elsewhere.
(Slate)
But perhaps Mayer may have made a mistake with this assumption. Economist Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics fame provides an argument against the idea that working from home lowers productivity: