HARDLY WORKING: Majority of Gen Z employees admit to ‘faking productivity’ on the job

It seems a lot of people are pretending to do more work than they actually do.

While performance art at work comes in many different forms and happens for different reasons, one generation is actually outperforming the others in its efforts to not work: Gen Z.

‘The average worker fakes about five hours per week.’

Con job

In a survey of full-time American professionals, employees have found remarkable ways to fake productivity.

Shockingly, 66% of employees admitted to faking productivity at work, and 73% of managers said they do it as well.

Gen Z has a particular affinity for it, however, outperforming older generations by 12 points when it comes to slacking off. A whopping 80% of them said they are faking productivity, while Millennials came in at 68% and Gen X at 58%.

The study from Software Finder also revealed some wild tactics employees are taking to make it seem as though they are actually working when they are not.

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MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images

Cat and mouse

The top two methods employees are using to fake work are “moving the mouse periodically” and “keeping a doc or browser tab open”; 56% of respondents said they use those tactics.

Another method used by 43% of full-time workers was purposely responding to non-urgent messages at a slower rate, or “slow-responding.”

More than a third of employees said they would log in to a tool they aren’t using, while about a quarter of respondents said they would send a strategic message on work apps like Slack or Teams to make it seem as if they were working.

Another 22% said they scheduled emails for later in the day.

All this fake work adds up to a massive amount of time burned over the course of the year. Specifically, the survey stated that the average worker fakes about five hours per week making it seem as though they are working. Multiplied over a year, that’s 260 hours, and when divided by an eight-hour work day, that’s more than 32 full days of work lost.

However, it may not be the employees’ fault.

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Showing up

More than half of respondents said they finished their work at least an hour before the day actually ends, so the rest is lip service.

Who are they faking it for? More than a third said their direct manager, while another 31% said “no one in particular.”

The latter is indicative of a trend of not working for the sake of it, as 27% of workers said they were faking productivity because of “general workplace culture.”

The next leading reason was due to their managers, who “measure presence over output.”

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