Workforce consultant Tammy Erickson spells it out very clearly in an interview with the New York Times: "As long as I work for you, I promise to have the relevant skills and engage fully in my work; in return you'll pay me fairly, but I don't expect you to care for me when I'm 110."

In her Harvard Business Review blog Erickson says loyalty has been replaced with trust, which is a more complex thing to manage. We can restore trust, she writes, with a new equation.

“Here's the equation I believe will form the basis of trust between corporations and workers for the decades ahead: The organisation will provide interesting and challenging work. The individual will invest discretionary effort in the task and produce relevant results. When one or both sides of this equation are no longer possible (for whatever reasons) the relationship will end. So if the organisation no longer has interesting or challenging work for the individual to do, or if the individual is no longer willing or able to engage in the work — to invest the levels of discretionary effort required for excellent results — it is in everyone's best interest to part ways.”

It’s not a bad idea. But let’s take it further. If companies are so focused on outcomes from the work, why does it matter that the person has to be in at 9am? If they can still get the job done, why can’t they slip in 10.30am or later? In fact, why do they even have to come in to work at all if they can get the same results at home or in another location?

Jessica Stillman at BNet talks about some companies adopting the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE). “If in the future agility in a changing marketplace demands employees and companies are going to understand themselves as exchanging effort for results, than isn’t it time for a more results-oriented work environment?” she writes.