Who Pretends to Work More—Employees or Leaders?

The employee checked off all his tasks: He had submitted a report, planned a presentation, and ranked the applicants for a new role. Phew—he was done for the week. And it was only Wednesday!

To some degree, such a scenario is many leaders’ worst nightmare, and it’s not entirely far-fetched: New figures from Workhuman show that 58% of managers fear that workers, lacking enough to do, are essentially faking work, and that 32% of employees regularly do fake work. They deploy a range of tricks, from filling up Outlook calendars to holding assignments for a few days after completing them. And it turns out that workers are not the only ones facing time voids—some 37% of managers and leaders also admit to faking work sometimes. “This really touches a nerve around sensitivity to remote work,” says engagement expert Mark Royal, senior client partner at Korn Ferry.

Delegating work has always been tricky for managers. Assign team members too much work, and burnout and dissatisfaction flourish; assign too little, and you end up with a team of avid daytime Netflix watchers. This was a problem during the pandemic in particular, when weekday golfing surged 83% from 2019 to 2022, and Wednesday 4 PM golf jumped by 278 percent. Gone are the days when employees would say, “Boss, I’ve finished. What else have you got for me?” Post-pandemic hybrid-work arrangements have caused leaders to worry about workers being disengaged from and uninterested in their jobs. Today’s leaders are more concerned about this, and—crucially—have more ways to track it.

Hybrid work has upped the ante, keeping workers home, far beyond the sight lines of their bosses. Even the most industrious workers find themselves with natural breaks during the day that they previously would have spent chatting with coworkers. “It’s a function of the remote environment,” says organizational strategy expert Sharon Egilinsky, a partner at Korn Ferry. “Those who are go-getters and feel accountability just have more time.”

Apparently, that includes managers and leaders too, according to the data from Workhuman, an employee-recognition firm. Experts note that managers are more likely to supervise workers from the so-called sandwich generation—who are caretakers of children or parents (or both), and who are more likely to fake productivity to help juggle their many responsibilities. “There can be a lot of squeezing happening among forty- and fiftysomething leaders,” says Alma Derricks, senior client partner at Korn Ferry.

To address all of this pretending, experts say firms can try to alleviate workers’ and managers’ sense of the expectations they’re under. The question, says Royal, is why people feel the need to appear to be always on; ideally, the goal would be to help staffers work smarter rather than harder. Leaders can rest assured that low motivation or disengagement is not to blame. Korn Ferry data indicates that engagement levels rose throughout the pandemic and continued afterward. “We are not seeing an epidemic of disengagement,” says Royal.

For workers required to use messaging apps, experts advise managers to focus on reducing the stigma around the appearance of being away, says Shanda Mints, vice president for RPO analytics and implementation at Korn Ferry. “As managers, we need to manage outputs and relax on the stigma.”

Learn more about Korn Ferry’s Workforce Management capabilities.

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