>As a manager, if you can't define productivity in real terms like that, and manage employee performance based on real work outputs, you're just doing it wrong.

That's easier said than done for white collar work.

It is hard to detect liars, cheats, and saboteurs in workplaces with a baseline expectation of trust and low micromanagement.

The problem IMHO is not people who do a great job on time, but people who inflate timelines, and derail projects.

If you give someone a novel problem, and they say it is difficult and will take 80 hours instead of 20, the only way to catch them in the act is to duplicate the work yourself or with another employee. Similarly, if they raise lots of questions and involve other people, it is difficult to determine if these are valid complications, or manufactured complexity, without replicating the work.

Humans are pretty good at deceit. Opportunities for deceit increase radically once you have tasks that are more complex than pushing buttons or punching tickets