"How do you know people are working?"

I dunno, champ, is the task you hired them for getting done?

Made an interesting discovery about my receptionist yesterday. She's not really capable of answering more than 50 phone calls a day. Got data going back three months to prove it. NOW - you could argue that holy shit someone who can't do more than eight phone calls an hour is a shitty receptionist and clearly she needs more managing. OR you could contemplate all the heinously complicated, folkloric dumb shit that goes into managing the communications for a multi-practitioner healthcare facility and recognize that 300 minutes of talk time a day in a 420-minute work day means holy shit when the phones are busy everything else grinds to a halt mebbe we oughtta increase our receptionist count.

If you can't tell if your employees are cheating you in this age of radical telemetry I'm sorry, you're a dumbass. Retire. And if you just wanna make sure that you own that person five days a week? Rather than paying them for their effort on your behalf? Apologize first.