Software meant to catch employees faking work is making them fake it more. At companies that use activity trackers and keystroke monitors, 63% of workers say the surveillance makes them fake productivity more often. Only 3% say it works as intended. The 73% number comes from a survey of full time US professionals, published this month. 66% of regular employees said the same thing about themselves. Gen Z workers topped every generation at 80%, ahead of millennials at 68% and Gen X at 58%. Workers in finance faked it most of any industry, at 85%. Inside management, the number changes by rank: 75% of mid level managers admitted to it, compared with 44% of directors and above. The average worker who fakes it spends close to 5 hours a week doing it. That is about 32 days a year, or nearly 7 full work weeks spent looking busy instead of being busy. The most common trick is moving the mouse every so often so a laptop never goes idle. 56% admitted to that one. An equal share keep a decoy document or browser tab open. 43% slow down their replies to non urgent messages on purpose, just enough to look occupied. Fake activity didn't start with monitoring software. In June 2024, Wells Fargo fired more than a dozen employees in its wealth management unit over what its regulatory filing called simulation of keyboard activity creating the impression of active work. The bank never explained how they did it. But small devices built to fake mouse movement were already spreading on Reddit and TikTok since the pandemic. When asked why they fake it, workers pointed less at laziness and more at management. 27% blamed general workplace culture, and 22% said their manager measures how present they look rather than what they actually finish. A separate Gallup finding lines up with that. Manager engagement fell from 30% to 27% in 2024, the sharpest drop of any group in the global workforce. Low engagement cost the world economy $438 billion that year. Buy a monitoring tool to stop the faking, and the data says you get more faking, not less.