Task-masking: The TikTok trend making RTO look busier than it is
Workers returning to offices are finding it tricky to actually fill all 8 hours with meaningful work. But with new visibility into their working days examined by bosses and colleagues also physically in the office, they’re working hard to at least look busy.
“Task-masking” is a TikTok trend where workers film themselves giving a performance of busyness on the job — some type furiously loud or make frustrated noises at their computer screens, while others walk fast around the office. User Daythree‘s clip shows his go-to activities to pretend to be busy at work — including flipping through a notebook from the first page to the last pretending to look for an important page of notes.
Pretending to be busy at work itself isn’t an entirely new trend, but since more major employers like Amazon, AT&T and JP Morgan have enforced stricter RTO mandates over the past six months, such videos on TikTok are garnering millions of views.
The trend speaks to the ongoing question at the heart of RTO debates: does being physically present at work translate to higher outcomes and impact? Or does more monitoring and less autonomy actually lead to lowered productivity?
Bospar Principal Curtis Sparrer remembers his favorite example of task-masking he learned from a friend’s mom growing up, who would always carry a large stack of files around the office. “I think everyone is wanting to do some professional self defense that way,” Sparrer said. “I think that when you’re in a physical office, that defense is a lot more performative.”
A recent Bospar survey including over 1,000 respondents conducted in December found that 61% of employees report being more productive while working from home, while just a third say they maintain equal productivity at home vs. in the office.
“I love a good performance, but I think that’s why a work-from-home environment is superior, because it cuts down on the theatrics and emphasizes and prioritizes the deliverables,” Sparrer said.
The concept of “productivity theater” also exists in remote workplaces and gained traction during the pandemic, with workers using mouse jigglers and other tools to appear always online on Slack and email platforms. That lack of visibility into the real working days and environment of employees has in part driven new RTO mandates.
“Companies that demand their employees return to the office are sending a message that presence equals productivity, however, this is not the case,” said Amanda Augustine, resident career expert for career.io and a certified professional career coach.
Just over a third of workers pretend to be busy or fake activity during work hours, regardless of their working environment, according to a survey from WorkHuman among over 3,000 full-time employees in the U.S. and U.K. About half of workers admitting to faking activity at work say they are above-average workers, that survey found.
“The key reasons for task masking may not be due to a refusal to do work, but rather from feelings of burnout from being in the office or not having enough work to fill their hours in the office,” Augustine said.
Rather than loading up task-maskers with more work, employers and HR leaders should work to get to the root of the problem, and find out what’s driving a culture where task-masking feels necessary due to anxiety around productivity, Augustine said.
“If you do start to find or uncover some task masking going around, you’d be better off getting a small focus group together to find out what’s going on and what are the underlying issues. Because this is just a behavior that’s reflecting an underlying sentiment that’s not being addressed,” she said.
Some task-maskers however may be high-performers who are simply able to accomplish their daily work in a shorter amount of time. Those employees should be given more work, but more as it relates to growth and development opportunities, like working with new teams and on new projects,
“If you are paying someone to do a certain job, and they are doing that job well and meeting expectations, just because they can get it done in a shorter amount of time doesn’t necessarily mean that they should be rewarded with more work, unless that more work or more responsibility is going to come with commensurate salary or title change.”