How to accurately measure job performance and spot when things are going very right or very wrong is a perennial question for workforce strategists. Gauging productivity is one way to do it -- but like a lot of knowledge work, which is highly individual, often situational, and largely immune to automation, accurately defining someone's productivity can be difficult outside of highly structured and quantifiable tasks.
Making the question of how to accurately gauge productivity even harder is the reality that it's easy to fake productivity using the same metrics that are supposed to assess it. In Workhuman's most recent Global Human Workplace Index survey, a whopping 37% of managers reported "faking" productivity at work.
As Workplace reports, "Leaders themselves are driving the phenomenon, with 38% of C-Suite executives admitting to faking activity, and 37% of all managers engaging in fauxductivity-- higher than the 33% average of all respondents, and 32% of non-managers."
So why are people faking higher levels of workplace performance than they're actually giving their colleagues or reports? Possibly because the people who are faking their productivity have found that it's not really hurting anyone else's perception of their job performance. Workhuman found that 69% of employees say that faking productivity hasn’t impacted their day-to-day work.
This leads to another question: If faking higher levels of productivity isn't harming the overall job or the fauxductive worker's colleagues -- why do it?
As with so many other studies around workforce habits and what employees really want, the answer comes back to well-being. The managers who admitted to fauxductivity all cited a need for better work-life balance as their number one reason for faking their work habits; they also said they suspected reports who were faking productivity were also doing so out of a need to address something gone wrong with work-life balance.
How to address the fauxductivity phenomenon? It starts with recognizing that only a few people fake doing their work because they're lazy. Far more are doing it because they're dealing with overwhelming workplace distractions, with burnout, or with a bad work-life balance. So it's on the people at the top to recognize that a company culture with a lot of fauxductivity is one where people don't feel safe showing signs of being human. And they can address that culture for the better.
As Meisha-ann Martin, Senior Director of People Analytics and Research at Workhuman, said, "Managers themselves need to resist the urge to keep up appearances and instead be vocal about when they’re taking a break. The re-energized, re-committed people that return to work after recharging will achieve better outcomes and better wellbeing than those who stay quiet and stay online."
Maybe instead of looking at the productivity metrics to see what's going well, we should start looking at the fakers who have figured out how to juke the stats. They're a valuable barometer for whether or not the workplace is accurately gauging how people work. They're an even more valuable indication of workplace wellness. And then, as a show of appreciation for this bit of workplace feedback, managers can set an example, tell their reports to get offline, and begin moving toward a more authentic culture with room to be human and to actually work as a result.
