It has always been a cat-and-mouse game. Employers who can never quite find it in themselves to trust their employees to be productive, and workers who come up with increasingly elaborate ruses to give the false impression of industry. The result for many staff is that they have never been so closely monitored at work.

Factory workers have always typically been housed in large open spaces, divided only by machines or warehouse shelving. Despite many highfalutin arguments by architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the biggest benefits of open-plan offices is – you guessed it – employers can cram in more staff per square metre. It saves on rent.

Workers once hid behind pot plants and pillars to avoid their boss’ roving eyes. These days, the ever-present ‘green dot’ is making it much harder.Credit: Bloomberg

And you can monitor them more easily. In January, Amazon was fined $51 million for “excessive” monitoring of its staff in its French warehouse.

Productivity can be heard in open-plan workplaces simply by listening to the level of noise from phones, the clatter of keyboards, or the sound of plant machinery doing its thing. A quick glance around the........

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