The REAL root cause, imho, isn't even productivity per se. It's the difficulties inherent in managing people, and the challenge of deciding "did that person do their expected share today or not?". And it's hard to tell if the expectation was fair, and its hard to tell the effort level too.
How to tell if someone who is getting stuff done, could get MORE done? Or do something more complex instead? How to tell who is slacking off, vs who is working hard but just maybe slower? How to set a deadline goal for a project that is "just right" as opposed to being unrealistic? That's very difficult to be objective in the best of circumstances. Unless you have people doing piecework, which isn't really what we're talking about here.
Example:
had an employee at my pervious employer, let's call it Cockwell Rollins. She was super highly rated at her job, but wanted more challenge. So I hired her to do a more complex job. She was totally worthless. She was a lot less capable than expected, but worse, spent most of the day watching netflix on her phone. Turns out her prior role was a small specialty sliver of work, and no one understood it but her. So it only took her a couple hours a day tops to get it done. But it was always done right, and the customer was happy. And she thought faffing around most of the day was normal. Her managers (the management role was rotational, so no one was ever there more than 12 months) never understood how little she had to do. They thought she was great. Bet her coworkers knew better though. Very typical of large corporations, imho.
Companies are unconsciously aware of how bad they (and their managers) are at this. So they do things like make everyone come in to the office all the time thinking that will help. And it might, a little.
