(From Fast Company)—Not a lot of people exclaimed “Yahoo!” at the online giant’s latest mandate, accidentally disclosed a week or so ago: workers could no longer work from home. Since that announcement, Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer has come under heavy fire from such respected online sites as Forbes, Slate and Bloomberg BusinessWeek—as well as from some high-powered Twitter users.

Does it seem contradictory, an internet company telling its workers they can’t do their jobs maximizing remote work via the internet?

Indications are that a big part of Mayer’s concern was that employees who worked from home weren’t as productive as those who came into the office, which brings us to a tricky issue that’s symptomatic of a seismic shift in how the U.S. does business.

As is widely written about, the fact is that the American economy used to be all about making things—but, in recent years, the service industry has vastly outstripped the manufacturing side. Every year, the list of Fortune 500 companies features more and more service companies and fewer and fewer manufacturers, and, currently, our GDP is estimated to be composed of roughly 19 percent industry and 80 percent service. Right now, six out of seven American workers are employed by service-oriented companies such as Wal-Mart and the Kelly temp agency, while only one out of ten are employed by manufacturers.

What does this have to do with Yahoo!’s shutdown of telecommuters? Simply this; it’s much more difficult to lead, manage, motivate and measure a team and the results of service work, as opposed to managing face-to-face manufacturing production. When a job is to make something, there are very simple physical measurements an employer can utilize when it comes to performance. With knowledge-based work, those measurements become a lot more elusive--and a lot less conclusive—especially when these knowledge workers are not at the office.

At the same time, younger workers, because they are accustomed to being service workers, want to be granted a lot more autonomy in their jobs. They feel they should be trusted to do their work wherever they might be doing it, and they resist any attempt at oppressive oversight by management.

Adding weight to their argument is the fact that productivity actually seems to increase when an employee turns telecommuter. A Brigham Young University study demonstrated that those who worked from home were able to work up to 57 hours a week before any real strain showed. Those who came to an office to work? Only 38 hours. Similarly, a Stanford University study concluded that workers were 13% more productive at home (in China, anyway…).

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