Fauxductivity: how to be a workplace slacker – and get away with it

Name: Fauxductivity.

Age: Decades old.

Appearance: I’ll tell you when I’ve replied to all these emails.

No, tell me now. I said I will. I’m just rammed at the moment. I have three back-to-back meetings later.

But you’re supposed to … I’m not going to apologise for being busy.

Fine, I’ll Google it. What does it say?

It says that fauxductivity is when workers give the appearance of productivity at the expense of doing any meaningful work. Well, there you go then.

It sounds to me like the logical end of the prevalent workplace culture of presenteeism. Ah, so you mean that workers have got so used to being expected to turn up at the office in order to be closely supervised that they’ve weaponised it?

That’s right. And now they fill their day with hundreds of meaningless surface-level tasks, and their employers can’t see that they’re avoiding their actual job because they’ve become used to equating “looking busy” with “being busy”.

Care to expand? Expand on what?

On what fauxductivity is. That is your job, after all. My job is to ask inane questions and yours is to provide pithy answers. I can’t, sorry. I have 16 Zoom calls to schedule, plus someone needs to organise a whip-round for Jeremy’s retirement.

But … hey, hang on! Are you fauxductivitying me? Oh, fine, you caught me out. Listen, this is the best racket in the game. Log in from home, silently sit in on a load of pointless meetings, jiggle your mouse a bit and your days are suddenly free to watch Netflix on the company dime.

Do people actually do this? I’m unsure. But managers think they do. New research has revealed that nearly half of all managers are worried about their employees faking their workload. On the other hand, about two-thirds of employees deny doing it at all.

Sounds like something that someone highly versed in fauxductivity would say. Right? No card-holding workplace slacker is ever going to actually admit to slacking off at work. Are you kidding? We know a trap when we see one.

We? They. I mean they know a trap when they see one. Listen, are we almost done here? I’m very busy.

What’s the solution to this? Well, it would be nice if employers actually focused on results, rather than micromanaging. If you can trust me to get through my workload on time, you can trust me to spend the rest of my day how I see fit.

Do say: “Fauxductivity is the equivalent of randomly tapping at your keyboard to look busy.”

Don’t say: “Hofu riuybibrkr,jiueo-39 807hr4”

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