Your employees may look like they're working — but they're not

Just because employees are back in the office doesn't mean they're more productive, much to employers' chagrin.

Forty-two percent of employees feel they're showing up solely for the purpose of being seen by their bosses and managers, according to a recent survey on the return-to-office sentiment from human resource management platform BambooHR. As a result, more than 79% of employees now use performative tactics such as making sure they're seen and timing their arrival and departure from work to make it look like they're working more than they are.

"The distrusting and performative cultures some companies are cultivating are harmful to bottom-line growth," Anita Grantham, head of HR at BambooHR, said in a release. "It's becoming more clear that leaders should take each employee's experience into account." 

Read more: All or nothing: Employers reconsider RTO

Companies initially turned to RTO mandates in an effort to increase productivity, but the survey found that 22% of HR teams were left without clear metrics to measure a successful shift back, meaning that they've seen mixed reviews of success. Workers — both in-office and remote — admit to only working for around three-quarters of a 9-to-5 shift, according to the survey, which means that on average, all workers typically spend two hours out of every eight-hour shift not working.

Instead, 37% of in-person employees admit to walking around the office so coworkers see them, 35% plan meetings with other coworkers who are also in the office and 33% show up earlier or leave later than their manager. Even among remote employees, 64% admit to keeping work messaging apps perpetually open, displaying a green "active" status even when they may not be actively working.

"The conversation around work modes is one of the most important things to address and get clear on as a business," Grantham said. "It often gets reduced to just RTO, but it's actually a much bigger conversation around how teams best work together and is a leader-led initiative."

Read more: Why managers are to blame for 'quiet vacationing'

In addition to productivity goals, nearly half of managers said that the main goal of their company's RTO mandates was to improve the company's culture. And yet, since having an RTO mandate in place, 26% of employees say a greater divide has developed between remote and non-remote workers, according to BambooHR's findings. 

The problem isn't necessarily with the RTO mandates themselves, according to Grantham, but rather with employers' inflexibility when it comes to adjusting them or tailoring them according to employees' responses. The solution to the preformative tactics employees are relying on could be to attempt to meet employees somewhere in the middle.

"Hasty changes to an employee's work mode can leave a company's culture in a precarious situation where employees are not unified, management teams are seen as overlords and employee satisfaction will continue to nosedive," Grantham says. "Strive for a balance between the needs of the organization and the needs of the humans we work with."Your employees may look like they're working — but they're not."