What to know about ‘quiet vacationing,’ the new work trend infuriating bosses

It’s the latest workaround.

Move over quiet quitting. Millennials have devised a new way to surreptitiously play hooky at the workplace: quiet vacationing.

That’s right, 30-something office workers are increasingly taking time off under the guise of working remotely — a hack facilitated by the uptick in work-from-home arrangements following the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to a recent Harris Poll of 1,170 employed US adults, 37% of millennial workers said they took time off without informing their bosses.

“Instead of going at it head-to-head and worrying about if you’ll rustle the feathers of your boss during a tight economic quarter, millennials are just kind of doing what they need to do to take their vacation,” said Libby Rodney, chief strategy officer at the Harris Poll.TheWaterMeloonProjec – stock.adobe.com

“There’s a giant workaround culture at play,” said Libby Rodney, chief strategy officer at the Harris Poll, while describing the quiet-vacationing trend, CNBC reported. “They will figure out how to get appropriate work-life balance, but it’s happening behind the scenes.”

This trend isn’t borne out of defiance, either. Rodney points out that millennials — who comprise 40% of the workforce — are reluctant to ask for vacation time because they feel like doing so makes them seem like slackers and layabouts in an increasingly cutthroat office environment.

According to the Harris Poll, nearly half of all survey respondents, including 61% of millennials and 58% of Gen Z, said they felt anxious about asking for PTO.

Meanwhile, 80% of US employees don’t take all their Personal Time Off (PTO) with Gen Z and millennial employees constituting the lion’s share, per the survey.

So they are taking breaks — they’re just doing so surreptitiously. “Instead of going at it head-to-head and worrying about if you’ll rustle the feathers of your boss during a tight economic quarter, millennials are just kind of doing what they need to do to take their vacation,” Rodney told Fortune.

Pretending to work from home isn’t the only “Office Space”-evoking tactic that remote-working millennials employ to game the system. Others include jiggling their mouses to prove that they’re present on Slack — even though they’re really Slack-ing off — or sending messages after clocking off to make it appear as if they’re working overtime.

Fortunately, Rodney says that employers can quell the “quiet vacationing” trend by supporting and even mandating taking a certain number of PTO days each quarter, as well as requesting time off themselves to show that it’s hunky-dory.

Millennials aren’t the only ones rebelling against management in unusual ways. Their younger cohorts, Gen Z — who are reportedly the hardest generation to work with — have increasingly taken to killing companies with kindness.

One Zoomer described on TikTok how she’ll give customers unauthorized 50% discounts to defy her corporate overlords.