Engineers doing their work in 2 days and being blocked for the next 5?
Example scenario: hand off a task, describe it fully, ask it be prioritised. Let me know how it goes, please raise any issues. Come back a week later to check in: employee hit minor obstacle, couldn't proceed, waiting on X or Y to do Z, almost nothing has progressed. No communication to me. Instead: spent time refactoring favorite library to do C which was not asked for and now is going to land on me to do code review before it can merge.
It's a low responsibility culture that many staff have and yeah - I can invest a lot of time and effort nannying these people or I can put even more effort into culture shift. But boy it is easier if you just don't have these people in the team to begin with.
A trend of "everyone's constantly waiting on <blank>" should trigger the manager to think "if we could make <blank> not a bottle neck, we could raise our sprint utilization factor by x%" and thus set prioritization accordingly. Engineers still have to figure out how to do that.
The engineers need to surface information about where their processes suck, but they need prioritization to implement fixes
They'd be furious and would be raising hell about it. Very few people want to just warm their seats, especially engineers. They want to do things.
I have a hard time believing that most of the affected engineers haven't raised the problem to management.