Why Gen-Zers are tricking bosses with performative work

Am I working hard or hardly working? You be the judge: right now, I'm sitting at my desk, plugged into my AirPods and typing furiously.

- Ellie Muir

I'm frowning slightly, which would suggest that I'm concentrating particularly hard and am fully engrossed in my work. And maybe I am. But my boss would never know if I was secretly replying in my “girlies who brunch" group chat, listening to an audiobook or surfing online shopping sites instead. That's because I could just as easily be “taskmasking” — a term coined for the workplace cheat-tool increasingly adopted by my generation, Gen Z, to fake productivity and appease our bosses.

According to a new report by Fortune, managers across different sectors have noticed that the youngest members of their workforces are more inclined to taskmask than older demographics.