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Welcome to the latest edition of The Gen Zer. This week, we’re looking at the apparent rise of ‘taskmasking’ in the work place and its ramifications for the hybrid office lifestyle. Plus, young people are using AI in schools to help them with coursework and the nuances of the LGBTQ+ community continue to be ignored in research and surveys.
When the intensity of the pandemic first began to subside about three years ago, offices slowly re-opened and allowed employees back to the work place. There was an expectation that this would mark the return of a normal weekly commute, re-establishing boundaries between our social and professional lives.
This was not the case. Instead, a new hybrid model emerged that saw employees adopt the best of both working environments, opting to only ‘pop in’ to the office when it best suited them and cracking on with projects mostly from home. Our archaic, traditional corporate routine had seemingly been permanently upended, promising a future with less burnout, better time management and improved wellbeing; there was even talk of a four-day working week.
Fast forward to today, and it seems like that utopian dream might be dying.
Recently published reports suggest that employers are pushing back against the hybrid model, with new surveys indicating 70% of all companies may return to permanent office routines in 2025. Firms in London say they see ‘better employee engagement’ with higher levels of office attendance and big companies such as Amazon have very publicly called for staff to be back at work five days a week.
Frustratingly, this development has given companies the excuse to explore new ways to keep track of employees, including dystopian suggestions like motion trackers, cameras, and invasive monitoring software. Where once it seemed like the pandemic had forced firms to realise that they can trust workers to get things done without being heavy-handed, it now appears to be going in the opposite direction. The joys of late-stage capitalism is in full swing here, folks.
So, if you’re a Gen Zer, what are you to make of all this upheaval? For many younger employees this will be the first time they’re expected to be in an actual, physical office for most of their working week. There are social pretences to be learnt, office etiquette to memorise and, perhaps most crucially, the art of pretending to be productive every moment of the working day.
Publications have been referring to this as ‘taskmasking,’ an age-old tradition that has been a staple of corporate life since the invention of the computer. For young people, this may be an entirely new experience. They’ve become accustomed to their own time management, stepping away from a screen when their project is finished and engaging with senior managers through the comfort of a Zoom call.
Stepping into a physical building all week presents entirely new challenges, and some employers are pre-emptively approaching this learning curve with suspicion and disdain. Fortune published an article this week, for example, that accused Gen Z of taskmasking so much that it puts their jobs at risk and fuels burnout. Managers are already paranoid at young people for not doing everything, all the time, without any breaks – and the big exodus back to the office desk has barely begun.
This chokehold that employers have on the time and wellbeing of their workers is depressingly mean-spirited. There is nowhere near enough criticism levelled at the nature of our societal expectations on employees. The five-day calendar originated during the industrial revolution of the early twentieth century, where factory work demanded a certain amount of intensive labour and subsequent rest periods. The Ford Company is largely credited with the creation of the system we still insist on using today.
Nearly a century later, our working lives are remarkably different yet our routine remains largely the same. Not enough is being done to change our attitudes toward what work really entails, despite the potential that hybrid home setups offered five years ago. Gen Z in particular are the perfect indicator that productivity can still thrive without forcing everyone into a confined space for 40 hours a week. Why are we allowing companies to bully us out of a revelation we’ve already had?
So, while some publications are taking the easy route of dunking on Gen Z for taskmasking, we should be spending more time examining the flaws in our capitalist structures. Maybe we should allow people to stop working once they’ve finished a project and lead company policy changes with results rather than clocked hours. Perhaps we should drop the pretence of the working office social dynamic, where everyone is expected to be at their desks in full swing every waking second. Human beings do not operate well this way and we already know this.
Taskmasking is really a symptom of a wider issue. If we did not have these hoops to always jump through, we wouldn’t feel the need to play a role of corporate compliance. Office jobs are an entirely manmade phenomena as it is, so why can’t we redefine what they mean? Why must we track every movement our employees make and pretend the home office doesn’t work, when it clearly does?
As Gen Z grow into the office this may shift. If even a pandemic and yearly lockdowns can’t cause permanent changes, then it’ll take a long time before employers finally get the message. For now, there’s nothing wrong with a little taskmasking to make your week more bearable – as long as you get everything done in time.
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