I (average american employee) don't get paid more to work harder or more efficiently and do better, but if my ass isn't in that seat from 8am to 5pm you can bet I'll be paid less.
You want people to work harder? Pay them more for it. Or at least fairly
Average Aussie here. "Presenteeism" is totally a thing here too.
I would argue that linking pay to product, rather than linking pay to timesheet would get people to work more. Directly link motivation!
But linking pay-to-product can be a hard problem!
Long story short (I have refactored this comment a few times), employees are "significant investors" in the business and should be paid as such.
Stock options are a perfect example of this.
Note the "significant" bit though. Most places with "stock options" do it as a token option. A bargaining chip of employment, to negotiate and minimise costs for the company. In Australia, mostly not an option at all.
Which leads to your:
"You want people to work harder? Pay them more for it. Or at least fairly"
Or as I think: If I don't have skin in the game then why should I care?
This is exactly true. I have a friend who used to spend "long hours" in the office. He basically did a VPN into his home network, where he works on hobby projects. Oh yeah, lots of reddit browsing, too. Presence is often equated with productivity.
I have coworkers who do minimal work to just get by and show up in meetings with strong opinions and argue endlessly over slack. They are generally smart but very lazy and very disorganized, so much so that people have brought it up the manager a few times but the manager shrugs and does not want to do much since it requires a lot of effort on manager's part to have difficult conversations and fix things.
