That's a problem with how companies see employment, rather than a description of how it should work. This leads to employees basically pretending to work, like in school how a teacher would assign us useless task sheets and call it "busy work".
It's been my experience that the people who pretend to work do so no matter how much real work they have.
I’m talking about people doing it specifically in response to this helicopter management style. There may not unlimited work to be done, but they expect employees to be doing something productive continually. This also penalizes people who work more quickly or efficiently than others.