I feel very empowered by WFH as a manager. I get gamed much less by the developers I manage. For instance I assign a duty or task as you mention, and I can now clearly see if anytime was spent on it or not. So during my progress reviews if a developer says he is still working on it, been a bit more complex than he expected, yet I can clear see when he was active on the system, and due to proprietary nature of our software, you can’t really spend much time that is useful outside our system, so if I see only 1-2 hours actively working, my activity data is second granularity, and I have statistical reports and graphs written up in R, so I know with absolute precision, but they don’t know. I now know clearly who lies and who doesn’t. I don’t tell the ones who lie that I know. Instead I just focus on the technical issues on their task, sometimes I just do it for them, to humiliate them.
They get pretty embarrassed when I complete their assignment in 2 hours after our meeting an assignment which should have taken them maybe one day but they have supposedly been working on for the last 8. It’s a very effective technique and so far has been applied to more junior employees with great success.
There is something you might be missing. I'm a developer. Quite a bit of my development time is not spent at a computer. It's spent working things out in my head while walking or jogging, or even just wandering around the house.
