Any company worth anything right now is or has already done surveys and studies to determine how much of their time is spent on productive work. In most office jobs, that's an average of 6 hours a day, especially in IT fields where the work is almost entirely thought-based. I've been through this a number of times now and with a push to return to the office, I've taken to using a time tracking program so I can round it down to the quarter hour (though I could log it to the second) especially since my team is being watched directly by C level managers.
They want to see that you're putting in productive hours and I get that. They want to see the work getting done and that's reasonable. However, especially in tech fields, there's no reason to physically see them. The CEO tried to pull the "I've had people reach out to me anxious to get back into the office" line at the last company meeting and literally no one believed him to the point that it's become a company joke because it's an IT company and we all know better. We all use remote desktop. We all use remote meetings anyway. We all have well established offices at home. Productivity went up. Employee satisfaction went up. Sales went up. Everything went up. Yet despite all of that, they want to put employees back in an office where numbers weren't so great. I've pointed out to my management that that's a bad leadership move, putting the company back into a position where it's not doing as well. Those managers didn't have anything to say against that because it's true. And I'm hoping that at least one of them run that up the pipeline that the employees have lost some faith in the leadership because of that.
And we all know that C level management is all about that status, just like the article said.
Just gotta know where to sting them.
In most office jobs, that's an average of 6 hours a day,
That jives with some of what I've read that says most people have roughly 35 productive hours per week before they start to burn out, outside the odd freaks that think 80 hours is taking things slow.
I used to be an 80-100 hour week guy because that's what the job required. It was a massive system shock transitioning back to 40 hour weeks because I did that for 5 or 6 years straight. Working less triggered a weird anxiety and depression because I constantly felt like I should be doing something. I'm doing about 25 hours/week now for part time contract work and some weeks that now feels like too much
I'm not confident they are getting full-time work out of their full-time employees anyways.
If you're hiring people on salary then it really doesn't matter just so long as they are doing the work in a timely manner.