Over the last few months, employees at my job have consistently over performed in the upwards of 5-20% of the expected productivity. A handful of the employees (including myself) have received monthly bonuses for performance as well, which take into account not only productivity, but work quality as well.
In the last few weeks, as result of this and mis-management (leadership organizes projects to complete and due to a mistake, expected work wss not available yet), projects to continue working on have diminished and we are left to ration out the amount of work we can complete daily. For most workers, this takes about 3-4 hrs and whether we take more or less time, we are required to stay for a 8 full hours. Individuals have been scolded for doing more work than rationed and the expectation is to do the same work over and over again in any remaining time we have.
Recently, with no work remaining to do, coworkers and I have naturally fallen into chatting more. Despite everything explained above, the manager has still taken issue with this. I'm not really sure why chatting would matter. This job is not customer facing and noise and content of conversation has never been raised as an issue, just time spent talking. There was a meeting held at one point solely to scold employees for talking too much, citing that conversations should be no more than ten minutes long, held at X time of the day, are not allowed hourly, etc. A coworker of mine had been in the office for no more than 5 minutes before the manager came over and told us to end our conversation. More recently, a meeting was held in which we were told of a new office seating chart. The reasoning for this, it was explained, was not related to talking, but to place new employees by experienced ones. Despite that, individuals not meeting this criteria were moved and it was people who tended go chat more than others.
Make it make sense.