One thing to consider is if your employer issued you the MacBook Pro they are very likely actively managing the device. System Preferences -> Profiles does not normally exist on a retail Mac. If you see that, look for an MDM Profile, that would mean your Mac is being managed by your employer. Then you can take a look at running processes that might be scanning the disk, phoning home to a server management console on-prem or in the Cloud even if you are not on VPN.
Some companies might deploy several security endpoints and it's a real bummer as they can certainly affect system performance. In some cases quite a bit of an impact, especially the ones with kernel extensions or ones that scan the drive. Such as Symantec or Carbon Black endpoints. There's also Tanium and Crowdstrike, etc., etc., etc.
You can take a look at the following paths to see what's loading daemons and background services via launchd (like systemd in Linux).
/Library/LaunchDaemons
/Library/LaunchAgents
~/Library/LaunchAgents
/Library/Extensions (kernel extensions)
If you find the culprit is indeed a security tool you should report that to your IT department so they can escalate with the vendor and fix the problem. It should not be impacting the device like that. I've seen that sort of thing in enterprise environments quite a bit and not just on Macs.
The worst offenders are the ones that run disk scans updating binary signatures or scanning for viruses. Typically, when the application is updated it will run a full scan which can really work a computer pretty hard. Eventually, it should finish the scan and performance should improve. But if it is interrupted it may start over or continue scanning some time later on. The IT department may be running scans more aggressively than perhaps they should.
Just something to consider as I see it all the time and with all the security threats online, every companies IT security department has been ramping up their tooling. Especially since COVID-19 and work at home.
