You can argue that mouse movement isn’t a good metric, but you’d have to substantiate why it suffered a precipitous fall over time.

I gave a possible explanation for this. In the office, there’s the need to “look busy” because your manager might be watching over your shoulder. I’ve been there myself, nothing to do, but still need to be glued to my desk and look busy. Even when you are actually working, maybe the environment is distracting so you don’t work very efficiently. At home, no one is watching over your shoulder and if you’re lucky you have zero environmental distractions.

Forget about mouse tracking and answer, has the quality of work suffered? You’re in IT so I don’t expect you to answer that question regarding other departments. But it’s a question that needs answered because that’s all that matters in my opinion. If the same quality work is being delivered by the same people from before WFH, why does mouse movement matter?

Making sure your wfh employees aren’t putzing around on your rdp farm is not authoritarian.

I only sort of agree with you from a compute resource planning perspective.

It’s the deep six figure guys that ironically need to be policed.

Going back to you being in IT and this not being your responsibility, those deep six figure guys should have their work measured by business impact and not something as silly as mouse movement.