I judge my teams by their results. If you meet or exceed the need, and you happen to do it at home while taking a few moments to pick up the kids or with some slack to spare, especially since you’re not spending 2 hours a day driving, dressing up, parking, etc, cool. All the good folks do as needed outside the normal schedule, and it’s comped back in.
The bad ones hardly need watching either; poor work or late and now our team has to have more checkpoint meets, and someone has to double-check that work; and if it doesn’t improve, problems happen.
I don’t need to spy on people to know this. They’re adults; if there’s a problem they can bring it forward and we’ll resolve it. It’s when they don’t act like adults and hide stuff like bad 5 year olds that bad things happen. If they’re excelling what do I care if they’re reading FR on their cell while on that Teams call?
Obviously the work machine has to be for work only. Never mind ‘use of company property’ which is true anyway — the wolves are at the door phishing and scamming etc. Dinking around with other stuff on the work machine is asking for a catastrophic data breach, loss of IP, failure of projects, PII or FTI out in the while and end to careers + the lives of those whose identity is stolen when data is lost.
There was down time when no one was calling and there were no orders on the machine to be entered.
You were still on the clock but there was really no work to be done. That was considered "free time" and you could do as you like. But when the phones started ringing and the faxes started buzzing you were expected to drop what ever it was and devote yourself to business.