One of the trailing remnants of the pandemic era is work from home or work from anywhere, for that matter. This not only gives you flexibility to work outside the four walls of the same white-washed office, but also gives you the independence to work at your own pace. However, now when youngsters are being called back to work from office, a major hindrance to their work schedule is adjusting to the quieter, more disciplined life in the office. They are often lost in trying to cope up with the rapidness of work and get overwhelmed when trying to keep up with the pace, resulting in low production. To combat this, so that they don’t get picked upon, they often resort to putting up a performance of showing that are busy working, while they may not be actually doing anything productive. This mock performance is called task masking, and yes, it’s a real trend.
An employee can resort to task masking for several different reasons. First, if the HR seems to find out that an employee is lazying around and not appearing to be productive, their job can be at stake. Second, there are several workplace culture which primarily defend visibility than getting the actual work done. Third, if the employee is facing a burnout or is not motivated enough to proceed with the work, they may put up a show of task masking. Fourth, team management is poor and not enough work is being allocated. In fact, by appearing to be working, when one is in fact not very busy, one is trying to put up a false show of working. But it complies with the principle of being present and showing that they are busy with work. And hence, one may continue to do it.
However, one is not deceiving the team lead or the management. Sometimes, they really don’t have enough work and out of boredom pretend to work. At other times, they may be working at their pace and getting the work done, but in the eyes of the leader, they aren’t working enough. This makes them appear to work more, work always, and work with a frowning brow!
How to identify task masking?
When you spot someone who has several tabs open on their laptops but is generally staring out of the window doing nothing, it means they aren’t really working on even one tab. Moreover, if you notice that there is a significant delay in work turnout despite the person having looked serious and working all along, then they were not truly working. If someone goes on working over –time unnecessarily day after day, then the whole work is a farce. Moreover, if one keeps on taking lighter work which are not the need of the hour and shirks high-priority work, and yet seem to be preoccupied the whole day, then they are performing the art of working-yet-not-working.
What are the dangers of task masking?
Task masking can invite dangers for the person practising it in the workplace. what most people fail to understand is that every work is complementing other works, and that there is a chain of activities happening around the workplace. If one person starts task masking or procrastinating, then the output of the whole chain goes down, even if the others had actually put in their hard work. Moreover, sooner or later, it does get visibility in the leader's eyes and those pursuing it are pointed upon and warned. It is because pretending to work and not progressing in actual work dosent justify their salaries.
How to manage task masking?
If you as a team lead, figure out that work is being allocated but production output is very low, then it is for certain that there are employees who are task masking on the team. To avoid this, one can set few but clear tasks to every team member. They need to measure the impact of the work instead of focussing on the hours one spends pretending to look busy. As team lead it is very important to clarify the priority tasks of each member so that they can primarily work around them, and accept add-on tasks on a secondary basis. If need be, a team lead may also refer to workplace counselling, so that every employee gets the motivation they need to work better.
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