As a company, we expect staff to be spending their working hours, well, working. We simply cannot afford to have people coming in at 9, chatting to people and making cups of tea.
Staff should be logged on and ready to go by their start role and they should be working right up until 5pm. They are perfectly free to get drinks during their lunch break.
Any manager with an ounce of common sense knows that actually their company cannot afford to work in this way. Staff recruitment and induction are very expensive, and operating like this in a way that ensures rapid staff turnover means your recruitment and training costs will go through the roof.
It isn't efficient, either. I once worked somewhere where the manager made a massive deal of starting work on the dot of 9 a.m. and the second the lunchbreak was over. It meant everyone clockwatched, spun tasks out, and stopped work on the dot even if they were mid word. It was incredibly inefficient.
Senior managers do patrol the office every so often to ensure our policy is being followed, but thankfully most staff comply.
What a ludicrous and expensive waste of senior management time.