A clean desk policy gone too far

I had dinner with a good friend last night and the discussion, as usual, lingered toward work-related topics. The company that she works for (a large multi-national company) recently decided to enforce a clean desk policy for security purposes.  Nothing wrong with that, except; this company did it to the extreme. Employees can not have even a small amount of anything on their desk. If they do happen to leave an item on their desk, a note goes into their employee file and points are taken off of their quarterly employee assessment which is directly tied to bonus and payment increases. Obviously, this has all employees grumbling and complaining and wondering if next they will be subject to body searches in order to go use the washrooms.

Had the company instead, communicated effectively with their employees through perhaps a well constructed campaign employees would have been able to understand and even, dare I say it...embrace the policy with the understanding that they are assisting the organization in maintaining a stellar level of security protection. Instead, the drastic measures of affecting their personal performance indicators has only led to an employee based frustrated and angry with their employer.  How would you have handled it?