Rearrange Your Office To Work Better For Employees

The problem with trying to regulate every second of a workers day is that they become resentful of what management is doing and they begin to look for ways to act out upon that resentment. The problem with being too lenient in the accountability department is that then there will be a certain percentage of employees that will take advantage of the situation.
It is difficult to find a happy median between the two, but it is worth the effort. You will have happier employees that are more efficient and are more inclined to give their best effort at all times. It is the kind of problem that comes from having to much leeway when it comes to getting supplies for example. When a worker on the floor needs to get some supplies for their job, they have to cross the factory floor to the central location of the parts, pick their parts and head back to their work station.
The problem comes in when there are delays in getting back to work. Somebody stops them to chat for a second, and then they have to visit the water cooler for a drink and then maybe to the restroom to wash their hands. Eventually they do return to their work area and get back to the task that was waiting for them. What should have been a ten minute excursion has turned in twenty or thirty minutes of additional time.
Time that could have better been spent working and being productive. They might not have set out to do those things, to waste that time, but it happens, and it is not just the workers on the floor, it is also a phenomenon that happens in the office as well. It isn't just the people that are lazy and looking to get out of their fair share of work, it happens to the best of personnel that can easily get side tracked because of the distance covered between destinations.
Just as the world has gotten smaller because of air travel, telecommunications, cell phones and the internet, your office and factory can shrink in the travel distance between needed supplies and communications. Setting up the office and the factory to be efficient, keeping parts easily accessible and not making things farther away than they have to be is the first step in the process.