What's wrong with the current corporate work environment?

This is a work environment that was implemented at Best Buy's corporate headquarters. This would be the ideal work environment for someone like me, as opposed to the micromanaged environment that I've had to put up with for years.

ROWE stands for Results Only Work Environment. In other words, they don't care if you're 35 seconds late for your break, because they aren't clocking that. They only care about the results of your efforts. Period. If you are producing results, they leave you be.

My last job was micromanaged far beyond belief. They hired temps so they could meet increased work flow quickly and easily, but shed them when things slowed down. I get why, it makes sense. You get 50 employees earning $14-hour sitting at the cubicle with nothing to do 5 hours a day, your company is hemorrhaging money. This is a smart and justifiable business move for them to hire only temps. I was one of those.

But what gets me is how tightly they scrutinized things. For example there was a 30 second rule on break time. This meant that if you went to break at 1:15:04, you had to be back from that break by 1:30:34. They only gave you a 30 second window. But the problem is that they gave you no means to monitor that, and I would often get dinged for it. I thought I was on time, but I couldn't see that I had gone over by more than 30 seconds. The other shitty thing is that as often as I was dinged for it, no one explained the 30 second rule to me till the day before I was laid off. So I had multiple infractions based on a policy that was not made known to the employee, and I looked bad. How the hell am I supposed to change it if I'm not informed? How the hell am I supposed to monitor it if I can't see when the seconds start?

I realize this sounds somewhat conspiratorial, but it seems to me that this was either a lack of judgement, an idiotic move, or an intentional move to help weed people out who couldn't follow procedures to the tiniest detail. There are other things that lead me to think it's the latter, but I won't go into them. I don't wanna get too in depth, because I don't wanna disclose anything about the employer (don't wanna be sued), and I don't wanna worry about them anymore because I no longer work there.

But it infuriates me. I scored consistently high. I commuted 50 miles to be there. I knew the work inside and out, often better than those seated around me. But they implement a policy like this, and give the employees no way to monitor it to ensure they are back on time?

When I asked how I was supposed to know if I was back on time, my answer was "One option is to come back from your 15 minute break after 14 minutes and clock in a minute early!"…………………………is that legal?

Regardless, I'm done with it. My rant isn't about the job itself, it's about the idiocy of micromanagement. You can micromanage something to the point that you'll always be able to find some mundane stupid policy that someone is violating, enabling you to have them by the balls and be able to shed them at any time. Or you can treat your employees like you trust them, and give them some slack and leeway. According to the ROWE model, showing trust in your employees is far greater than instilling fear into them. You can reduce turnover, and create a much more competitive and loyal work environment.....

.....but corporate America is a behemoth that is slow to change.