When you pay people for their time instead of their output, the only rational response is to take as long as possible to do as little as possible, and the strange thing is how surprised everyone still manages to be when that's exactly what happens.
The entire return-to-office debate runs on a delusion that executives rarely examine closely enough to notice: the assumption that physical presence guarantees productivity, that forcing a person into a cubicle for eight hours somehow prevents them from wasting seven of them. The reality is closer to the opposite, because the modern office isn't a defense against busywork so much as the place busywork was invented. Remote employees get accused of sneaking in a load of laundry on company time, while their office counterparts spent the better part of three decades perfecting the far subtler art of doing absolutely nothing while staring intently at a screen, the hours quietly evaporating into synchronized coffee runs, hallway chatter that goes nowhere, and meetings whose sole function is scheduling other meetings.
The problem was never location.
It's structural.
The standard employment contract contains a flaw baked so deep into it that most people never think to question it: it compensates time, not output, and once compensation is tied strictly to the clock, speed becomes something to be quietly punished rather than rewarded. A genuinely competent employee who finishes the week's deliverables by Wednesday afternoon is never sent home early with full pay for their trouble.
Instead, they're handed the unfinished backlog of a slower colleague, so that efficiency is repaid, reliably, with a heavier load.
Faced with that math, the competent employee adapts, and adapts fast: a three-hour task learns to take three days, unnecessary status updates get scheduled for their own sake, email replies get strategically delayed by a day here and an afternoon there, until an entire quiet discipline develops around doing as little as possible while still appearing, at every checkpoint, fully occupied. Busywork, seen this way, isn't a failure of motivation at all: it's a highly rational adaptation to an incentive structure that was broken well before anyone showed up to work inside it.
You can watch the exact same dynamic play out anywhere revenue is tied to hours billed instead of problems solved, from hourly consultants to government contractors, all operating on an identical piece of logic: when your income depends on the meter running, the work has a funny way of taking just a little longer to finish, and the longer a problem is allowed to persist, the more billable hours there are left to extract from it.
Middle management resists shifting to output-based pay exactly for this reason: it would reveal, almost immediately, how little time the actual work ever required, and along with it, how little their role itself was ever adding.
You get exactly what you incentivize.
If you buy someone's time, don't be surprised when that's all you get.