As employers crack down on hybrid work, insisting that the US corporate class head back to the office, gen Z reckons with a dilemma. How do you appear to look busy enough to appease an ever-present boss?
Thirty years ago, Seinfeld’s George Costanza had a theory: “Always look annoyed.” That way, “people think that you’re busy.” Today, performative productivity goes by a new name.
“Bosses beware, gen Z are ‘taskmasking’,” read a recent, rather narc-y Fortune story. “They’re going the extra mile to look like they’re working hard while actually hardly working.” One example of taskmasking: moving quickly though the office while carrying a laptop or clipboard – straight out of a West Wing walk-and-talk. Another example: typing loudly, like a DMV employee having a bad day, even if what you’re typing has no relevance to your job.
Both a TikTok trend and something managers and HR types are seeing in action, the rise of taskmasking comes as more employers mandate a return to office. In September, Amazon announced it would require all workers to come in five days a week, as if it were 2019 all over again. Companies including Goldman Sachs, Dell, Condé Nast and the Washington Post issued similar decrees. (A couple of small hitches: because their offices don’t have enough space for all employees to comfortably work together, Amazon delayed return-to-office and Condé Nast’s editorial union is protesting the requirement.)
A swath of the US’s young office workers came of age when the pandemic required staying home. This might be the first time they’ve been asked to consistently commute to a job site instead of getting tasks done on their own schedule, in the privacy of their home. Now, physically surrounded by colleagues and higher-ups, they must learn to visually communicate busyness.
In 2019, the culture writer Anne Helen Petersen described the similar phenomenon of “Larping your job,” borrowing the acronym for live action role playing.
“You can Larp your job in person (holding lots of meetings, staying late and getting there early as a show of ‘presentism’) and digitally (sending lots of emails, spending a lot of time on Slack, or whatever group chat platform your organization uses),” Peterson wrote.
Gabrielle Judge, a 28-year-old content creator and writer known as the Anti Work Girlboss, used to work in tech and remembers the ways she and her coworkers would taskmask or Larp their jobs in the office.
“People would look really busy when they were actually just getting lunch, or would wear their AirPods all day so it looked like they were in meetings,” Judge said. “A lot of people would also just stare intensely at their computers.”
Coffee breaks or water cooler meetups – that is, if offices still have the antiquated device – count as taskmasking if coworkers talk about their jobs rather than last night’s big game or award show. “You can drum up a conversation with someone to look busy,” Judge said. “There’s a lot of performative work at the office.”
While taskmasking might not help get any real work done, it can feel like a full-time job of its own. “It’s exhausting having to mask all the time at work,” Judge said. “We get so tired going into an office, even if you didn’t do anything differently than you would at home. It’s just the tiredness that comes with the social exhaustion of playing a role.”
Cierra Gross runs Caged Bird HR, an independent human resources consulting firm that workers hire to help with workplace claims of harassment and discrimination. Before leaving corporate life in 2022 after experiencing burnout and depression, Gross spent years in traditional HR departments at Google and ExxonMobil. She calls taskmasking a symptom of the broader issues surrounding hiring, talent management and workforce planning – namely, bosses’ desire to get folks back in the office at all costs, mostly for the show of it.
“It is inevitable that there will be people who try to game the system in every company,” Gross said. “Taskmasking might be associated with low performers, but high performers who quickly finish their work can also do it, too.”
It’s not uncommon for workers to complete a big project and then have nothing to do in the office. “As far as your manager is concerned, your work is done, so you can just sit at a computer and surf the web,” Gross said.
We can expect taskmasking to stay strong as more workers outsource the brunt of busy work to AI, freeing up their days for more loud water cooler conversations and fake typing sessions. Still, bosses may be on to them: a 2021 study found that 80% of companies monitor remote and hybrid workers, with many using specialized software to track online activity, location and keystrokes. And according to Wired, the surveillance continues inside offices too, where new technology – including motion, light intensity and humidity sensors – is available to bosses who want to spy on specific rooms and desks.
For now, taskmasking lives on as a way for employees to take back some control. “Gen Z has graduated high school and college remotely, done so many milestones from home, so the idea that work can only be done in an office is so far off,” Judge said. “Taskmasking is a result of how people feel bitter and frustrated over this. I think it begs the question to employers: how important is being together?”
