Kelebogile Mabokela was distracted by the incessant chitchat around her while working at Helen Joseph Hospital in Johannesburg, South Africa. Doctors, nurses, professors, and cleaners passed through the office daily talking to one another and to her.
Fed up with cacophony last month, Mabokela resorted to trickery. She searched for a video of an old work meeting and played it on her computer screen. The ruse did the trick: The loud talking ended and colleagues left her alone so she could work without interruption (and also scroll on her phone a little, she admitted).
“It worked,” Mabokela told Fortune. “Because after I put it on loudspeaker, when they come into the office, they start whispering.”
If you’ve ever found yourself stuck with a gabbing coworker who makes it difficult to work, you’re not alone. And if you’ve taken extreme measures to get peace and quiet, you have company too. Employees worldwide have found a solution that lets them avoid seeming like party poopers by telling colleagues—or in some cases, family members or friends—to be quiet and to stop bothering them. They merely use a video of a random meeting to pretend they are busy so others assume they don’t have time to talk.
The trend comes after many companies have required employees to return to the office after the pandemic. Compared to the quiet of working from their kitchen tables or from bed, many employees have found their offices noisy and distracting.
It’s also a product of leadership that values employees always looking busy, even if they’re not. After all, no one wants their boss to pass by and see that they’re doing nothing, experts say.
The district council meeting heard around the world
Part of Mabokela’s struggle at the hospital is that she doesn’t directly work with the people around her and therefore doesn’t need to be part of their discussions. Instead, she collects data for the university that is affiliated with the hospital.
So the next time she wanted to subtly shush her coworkers, she tapped YouTube after the videos in her employer’s archive were slow to load. Specifically, she clicked on a two-hour recorded district council meeting in New Zealand posted a few years earlier, in April 2020.
The video from a municipality called Waipā has an astonishing 1.8 million views—an unusually large number for any council meeting, but especially for a town with a population of just 60,000. Residents would have to watch at least part of the video 30 times each for it to reach that number of views.
In the meeting, finance and corporate committee members discussed providing welfare support to local hospitality businesses and heard a presentation from a nearby airport about how it could save money during COVID. The video has attracted more than 1,000 comments, many of which are from users who say they’re doing the same thing as Mabokela.
“I started feeling like I’m not crazy,” Mabokela said after realizing how many people fake their attendance at virtual meetings. “You get some sort of comfort when you realize you’re not the only one doing this.”
That video, along with some others from the district council’s account, is occasionally interrupted by ads. While that complicates how effective it is for Mabokela’s purposes, it means Waipā earns money from viewers tuning into its meetings. YouTube pays an average of $18 for every 1,000 views on monetizable videos, according to Influencer Marketing Hub, which could mean more than $32,000 for the district, depending on when ads started showing up during the video. The Waipā district council didn’t respond to requests for comment.
While return-to-office initiatives have pushed homebody employees back into shared workspaces after years of COVID-related shutdowns, the video ploy isn’t necessarily a rebellion against corporations, said Michael Halinski, who teaches about organizational behavior and human resource management at Toronto Metropolitan University. It instead represents a new way that workers are dealing with an age-old problem.
“It’s not new that people are territorial over their time and try to create boundaries with coworkers,” Halinski told Fortune. In the past, employees wore headphones to cue they were working, he said. “This is a more modern way to signal to others: I don’t want to talk to you.”
Zoom, the widely used service for streaming corporate meetings, didn’t respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Faking Zoom attendance as a ‘mental health break’
For one Florida-based crematory manager who spoke with Fortune, playing videos of random meetings on his office monitor lets him get work done without being interrupted by colleagues. He requested anonymity to speak openly without fear of retaliation in his workplace.
He and his staff spend a lot of time doing paperwork, and one employee visits his office dozens of times daily for assistance, he said. Earlier this year, he attended a video meeting for his own job and noticed it kept his colleagues, and that particular worker, out of his hair. Later that afternoon, he searched YouTube for meetings and landed on a team call from GitLab, a San Francisco–based coding company. “I got so much done that day,” he said.
“I have no idea what these folks are talking about,” he said about the GitLab meeting and the technical jargon in it. “But they smile here and there. It looks like one guy is running the thing. It works.”
He has since pulled up the same video two more times in the office, calling it his “mental health break” from his one colleague. “I can’t abuse it because I need it to be effective,” he told Fortune. And yes, he knows how bad it sounds, he added. But sometimes it saves him from having to work late.
Some of the most popular meeting videos on YouTube come from GitLab, which posts many of its internal calls online. Transparency is a key value to GitLab because it makes collaboration easier, according to its company handbook. One of GitLab’s videos has more than 300,000 views and 200 comments, many aligning with this trend of workplace subterfuge.
GitLab didn’t respond to requests for comment.
“They’re not just doing this at work, but at home,” said Jessica Methot, who teaches human resource management at Rutgers University and has published research on office small talk. “We might not have had a home office space before [COVID], but now we do, and our kids are coming home early. You’ve told your kids and your spouse, ‘Don’t come in if I’m on a call.’ And this is a way to say you’re busy, even if it’s not true.”
One web developer who lives in Malappuram, India, told Fortune he used YouTube to avoid social interactions at home, though it wasn’t to focus on work. He recently played a GitLab call from his room to escape a house full of guests when he wasn’t feeling well, he said. He requested Fortune not publish his name to avoid insulting the friends he had shunned.
The underlying problems
That hundreds of employees globally have all searched for these videos may lie in other workplace failings. Open office spaces have grown in popularity over the last 20 years as a way to reduce costs and promote collaboration. “What we saw as a result,” Methot said, “is [employees] put in headphones because it’s loud, there’s not a lot of private or dedicated work spaces, they fake watching Zoom meetings because if they aren’t, they’re constantly experiencing intrusions.” What’s needed is a rethinking of workplace design that can include dedicated quiet spaces, she said.
Faking attendance in online meetings may also stem from a lack of trust in management. “I may not be sure how my performance is being measured, so I need to make my performance more visible,” Methot said. “Supervisors could have clearer communication about performance expectations: Here’s what we’re looking for. Don’t try to look busy—that’s not what we’re evaluating.”
And while small talk can be distracting, it’s an important social function in any office space, she said. It can help workers shift between tasks, like transitioning into an important meeting. Acknowledging someone’s presence also promotes trust between coworkers, she said. Building community is not only beneficial for corporations but for individuals as they navigate the “epidemic of loneliness,” which the U.S. Surgeon General last year flagged as a public health crisis driven partly by increased dependence on technology and pandemic-related isolation.
Mabokela, the South Africa–based hospital worker, thinks tuning in to these meetings could help address loneliness as well. While her goal is to avoid small talk, “some people aren’t there to just pretend [to work],” she said. “It’s deeper than this. It makes you feel connected to people.”
In her own workplace, she has no plans to stop with her video gambit.
