"Far too often, this combination of executive anxiety, monitoring, a lack of trust, and having employees perform to the metric of being in the office all contribute to lower performance, which I call a doom loop. (See “Focus on Productivity, Not Physical Presence.”) Employees who know they are being monitored react in a variety of ways. To start, 49% of them report high levels of anxiety, compared with 7% of people not being monitored, according to a study from the Centre for Transformative Work Design. Not a recipe for getting the best out of employees."
"More to the point, monitoring does not work. It’s easy enough for employees to perform to the system by scheduling when their emails go out, keeping their status active online even when they’re not working, or buying mouse jigglers. While this might seem like cheating the system, employees are reacting to the core issue, which is a lack of trust."
Return-to-Office Mandates: How to Lose Your Best Performers