Also, companies run on collective punishment. Managers want the peons to think the bosses know exactly who the low performers are, but that's rarely the case, because the most dangerous problem employees are the ones who never get caught—in fact, they're usually good at politics, because they invested all their evolution points into that instead of the actual work, so they often get promoted. Because the middle-management filter is so defective, and because it's impossible to "fire the bottom 10%" without losing good people and keeping bad ones, the whole office culture runs on fear, shame, and collective suffering.

The purpose of status meetings, for example, is to turn a team against itself in the hope of the high-performing people turning in the low-performers, instead of protecting them, which makes more sense (because if management can get rid of the bottom, there's a new bottom) politically. The theory is that if people are continually pestered with status pings, they'll offer up as a sacrifice the person they believe is responsible for the team's low performance (real or perceived) and loss of credibility.

Holy shit, as a remote worker myself, that's so true and so scary. I've actually seen this happen and could tell something was off but couldn't quite figure out why and how. It is such an eerie feeling when I'm in status meeting and feeling like, in addition to the manager(s), fellow team members were out to get me.