My experience is much the same, they always want to be seen arriving early and leaving late but are happy to do fuck-all in between.

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.

Because a lot of management just seems to be looking for evidence of work happening and presence is seen as evidence.

Same here. I especially loathe the "watercooler talk", when people just hang around and chit chat to burn another half hour.

But I have to admit, I have also seen this behaviour in European engineers, so it is not unexpected.

Honestly I think there's a limit somewhere to how much useful work people can do in a week anyway!

I wholeheartedly agree. Even if it is not about "all this week's work has been finished", but "this week's work has taken a toll on me, thus I may not be productive until I get some rest".