Ha! I was a team lead at a company where something similar happened. Management was obsessed with the burn down chart and equated total completed with productivity.

So I told my team to make tasks as atomic as possible. If it can describe two meaningful changes then it should be two tasks.

I actually preferred this outcome. Instead of a large task for a feature, we had hundreds of tiny tasks that culminated in a feature. It was far easier to get a handle on what was getting done and what was the impediments.