Bosses Admit To Faking Productivity More Than Their Employees

Coffee badging, quiet quitting, mouse jigglers … there’s really no need for another term to describe today’s workforce. But each of those phrases could fall under the umbrella of “fauxductivity,” or fake productivity.

Productivity has been one of the top workplace issues discussed among experts this year, with companies fearing the effects of “the great detachment.” Fortune 500 CEOs even ranked “low productivity” as their top organizational challenge for the year, according to software firm Atlassian .?

And while the majority of employees are not exaggerating about their productivity, according to a Workhuman report, 48% of managers say that faking productivity is a problem on their team. But the call may be coming inside the house: 37% of managers surveyed in the report admitted to faking their productivity, compared to 32% of non-manager employees. Even more C-suite executives admit to participating in “fauxductivity,” with 38% saying they do.?

It’s clear that employees aren’t the only ones faking their productivity—their bosses are doing it, too. The phenomenon could be part of larger “always-on” workplace cultures.?

“Managers especially are in the position to promote a workplace culture that allows employees to be human and say when they’re struggling—not turn to performative productivity,” Meisha-ann Martin, senior director of people analytics and research at Workhuman said in the report. “Managers themselves need to resist the urge to keep up appearances and instead be vocal about when they’re taking a break.”?

Happy reading, and hope you have a lovely week!

— Maria Gracia Santillana Linares , Careers Reporter

Work Smarter

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Careers Advice Q&A: Managing Ryan Serhant’s 1,000 Minutes

As a real estate agent, broker and now CEO of his own firm, Ryan Serhant is in charge of his calendar. But it can be difficult to properly organize all the minutes of your day into the most productive, and effective, schedule. I spoke with him about how he first created his “1,000 Minute” rule of time management, how he’s implemented it throughout his career, and the importance of establishing boundaries early on in your career. Our conversation below has been edited for length and clarity. You can check out our full interview here .

For everyone who doesn’t know what this is, what is the “1,000 Minute” method?

So, I’m in sales, I’m an entrepreneur, which really means that I don’t have a salary, I don’t get paid hourly. There’s no benefits. There’s no nothing. You wake up every day, you eat what you kill, or you don’t. When I was young, 22, living in New York City with no job, with rent, bills, electricity and food to pay, I had to figure out how to manage my day. Whether I’m trying to sell real estate or insurance or I was trying to act at the time, I saw everybody else had scheduled calendars based on their appointments, and a lot of what was set by, like, middle management or their bosses. Which then evolved to knowing that everybody has the same amount of time in a day. I just need to be the one who’s the most productive with the time that I have. I also need to make sure that I don’t throw days or weeks or months away if I have a bad hour or a bad call. So I looked at my calendar and said, ‘all right, I’ve got 1,440 minutes a day. Roughly 440 of those minutes I’ll sleep, I’ll hang out, I’ll eat, I’ll do what I need to do.’

I’ve got about a thousand minutes a day to be productive. Now, some people have 200 minutes a day, some people have more than a thousand minutes. It really depends. But mine was about a thousand. I’m the CEO of my own bank of time, and every day I wake up with a fresh thousand dollars in my account that I get to be productive with. And it protects me against time vampires, it protects me against wasting time for all those meetings that turn into a two-hour lunch. Like, that could have been an email, that could have been a phone call, that could have been a text message. So it really helped me start to think about how I use my time wisely as an entrepreneur who does not have a salary or an hourly wage.?

Has it ever become too restrictive to the point where you’re stressed? So if this meeting went over 16 minutes and now you can’t do this for whatever reason.

No, I don’t allow myself to be like a prisoner to my own calendar. It actually helps me be far more free. For all the structure I’m talking about right now, I’ll tell you, I feel far more restricted if I’m in a two hour meeting that didn’t need to be two hours or if I’m on a one hour call that just didn’t need to be this amount of time. There’s a lack of respect there. And someone just took those minutes from me and they didn’t pay me for them. Those are a far bigger waste of my time than operating under a calendar this way. Because I’ve been so public with my thousand minute rule, because Harvard’s written about it and I wrote books about it, people know about it. People who work with me are very, very cognizant of my time. And if they don’t like it, they don’t have to work with me. It’s okay. There’s 8 billion people on the planet.?

What’s your biggest tip for someone who’s maybe looking to get a new time management system?

The first thing I would do is do a time audit, the same way you would do a diet diary if you’re trying to lose weight. Instead of just going cold turkey on sugar for the next month, which is impossible, you really just go about your day for the next week. It’s the same thing with time. Actually go through and calendar every little thing you do, including access to social media. Use the screen time calculator right on your phone and it’ll tell you how much time you spent on your phone and just write it down. Spend a week, seven days including the weekends, and really look at what you spent time doing. Then look back at it, color code it and say, ‘holy macaroni! I thought I was working really, really hard, but I wasn’t. I was just really busy and the busyness isn’t productive.’ So the doom scrolling and the this and that that I do is actually aiding towards making me feel bad about my life or my career or myself.?

How you spend your time affects you mentally as food would affect you physically. So I would tell everybody: Do a time audit for seven days, look at it and see where you can start to make compromises before you go crazy and start budgeting your time based on a thousand minutes.

Touch Base

News from the world of work

• Fewer jobs than expected were added in August, with U.S. employers reporting an increase of only 142,000 nonfarm payroll jobs. The unemployment rate, however, dipped to 4.2%. Yet after revisions to June and July’s job growth saw 86,000 fewer jobs created in that period than originally reported, the labor market remains unstable . “August payroll data indicate risks are rising and the labor market is clearly softening,” Carson Group strategist Sonu Varghese told Forbes’ ?Derek Saul.?
• Employee retention is the name of the game—at least that’s what the Federal Reserve seems to think. In its latest “Beige Book” installment, which summarizes the current economic condition of the U.S. by federal reserve districts and across the board, the Fed says employment levels have remained relatively flat.?
• Aerospace company Boeing reached a tentative agreement with a worker’s union representing 33,000 employees, potentially avoiding a strike. The deal includes 25% raises over four years for all union members and lowers healthcare cost share. Union members will vote on the tentative agreement Thursday.?
• The White House last week launched an initiative to fill 500,000 open cybersecurity positions across the country. The recruitment and hiring push is aimed at filling jobs in cybersecurity, technology and artificial intelligence, with a focus on bringing candidates without traditional qualifications into those positions.
• Workers at major tech companies are overwhelmingly donating to Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign,Reuters reports . Data from OpenSecrets, a nonprofit tracking campaign financing and lobbying, found that tech employees at Google parent Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft are donating more to the Democratic bid for the White House, marking a stark difference from tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, who are backing Donald Trump.

Quiz

Which American company has the longest job interview process, with an average of 39.27 days between the first interview and the first day on the job?

A. Amtrak

B. Uber

C. Air Force

D. FBI

Check if you got it right here

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