It reads like you are describing reporting. How many frowny faces were sent out at Store 123 last month for attendance? But the reason you need lower/middle mgmt is that the real question is "so what do we do to stop having these frowny faces?"
The supply of even untrained workers is finite, so you have to treat them as people.
We could do this with developers too. Give the biggest raise to the developers with the most lines of code committed, and maybe design a shiny dashboard with it as a number to replace the project manager. What could possibly go wrong?