Fauxductivity is not about lazy or skiving workers . Fauxductivity is term HR professions have coined to describe the problem of wide spread behaviour in which employees feel the pressure to always look busy. This has a detrimental effect on the organisations productivity and performance because looking busy often means doing things that don’t need to be done or are a low priority but allow the individual to avoid the more challenging or arduous tasks whilst maintaining  the appearance off being conscious and hard working. You may be surprised to learn that managers are often the worst offenders.

Very busy managers, the ones who arrive early, leave late and spend all day in back to back meetings but achieve very little are victims of the always busy culture. A culture in which managers are expected to be fully occupied every minute of the working day tackling an unremitting workload. As such they are modelling the wrong type of behaviour.

As an Assistant Director ( AD)in a large organisation, I once worked for a Director who assumed if you weren’t in a meeting you weren’t busy.  He had his PA write on a large white board each week the diary commitments of each member of his senior management team. The board was displayed in such away as he could see at a glance at any given time of day what his senior managers were doing. As a new member of the team It quickly became apparent that it was very much in my  interest not to have any space in my dairy. Because if you did the Boss was likely to fill for you. This encourage a culture of unnecessary and over long meetings which made everyone look busy but achieved very little.

Ironically the meetings were often to discuss reports that people had been too busy to read!

The Director having set the tone everyone soon got the message,”look busy”.  This fed into and reinforced a culture of long hours and presentism. People were described as hard working and committed irrespective of their out put or achievements but because they were always busy. This approach also reflected an expectation that If there was a problem you had to be seen to be doing something about it. The more activity the better even if it was unhelpful or disruptive.

Before I had even got my coat off the Director burst into my office saying “you’re here”as if I was expected earlier. “ What’s this about a £million hole in the budget and why am I hearing it from the corporate head of finance and not you?”  He was clearly embarrassed and anger that the impression had been created that he didn’t know what was going on in his own Directorate and wanted to know what I was going to do about it. I said I would investigate and get back to him as soon as possible.

The explanation turned out to be that early indications were that the final accounts for the financial year were going to show an overspend in the region of a £ million pounds had been leaked. ( A £ million is a highly emotive figure in the world of local government).  The important thing was that there was still a lot of work to be done over the next few days by the finance team which would undoubtedly reduce that figure.

There was nothing I could do but let them get on with their work. This was a day when I was due to attend my monthly senior managers interagency  learning set. A high profile initiative bringing together senior people from a range of business and organisations across the City. I desperately wanted to honour my commitment to the group and attend but I didn’t because I knew my boss would expect me to be busy sorting out the problem.

At the end of that day my boss said to me approvingly that he had noted I had not attended my personal development event but had stayed in the office to deal with the budget problem! So in one sense it was a good call I did what my boss expected even though I did nothing other than pass on the news that latest figures showed the over spend would be less than £ million and probably under half a £ million.

 Fauxductivity is the pressure to appear always busy, it is the symptom of a poor management culture in which employees are judged not on their out puts or achievements but the appearance of working hard. Hence if we did less we would achieve more.