Senior leaders love to complain that Gen Z and younger millennials invent excuses to skip work when the weather turns nice. New data shows many of those same bosses are doing it themselves.
PDFFly surveyed 2,000 managers and senior managers and found a striking double standard. Fully 85% of managers believe their employees fake reasons—dead Wi-Fi, phantom doctor or dental appointments, sudden “illness”—to grab extra summer days off. Yet half of those same managers admit they pull the same tricks.
The excuses line up almost perfectly across ranks. Managers suspect employees of:
- Claiming the Wi-Fi is down
- Inventing medical appointments
- Calling in “sick”
When asked what they use themselves, managers confessed to fake sick days first, followed by exaggerated family obligations, invented appointments, and fabricated tech problems. Nearly 10% skip the pretense entirely: they log on and simply do no work.
The productivity hit is real. Six in ten managers say output drops in summer—18% call the decline “significant,” 42% say “slight,” and 37% report more than a 10% dip. One in three say the slowdown has cost the company a client or a deal.
Quiet vacationing and medical leave
Managers aren’t alone. Nearly four in ten millennials admit to “quiet vacationing”—taking time off without telling the boss, keeping a work phone nearby and checking in just enough to stay under the radar. A separate Resume Builder study found that 43% of quiet vacationers disappear for up to three days; a quarter take a full week.
Others go further, using medical leave for stretches of up to 12 weeks of job-protected (and sometimes paid) time off. Some openly frame it as gaming the system for extra PTO. Others describe it as essential: one TikToker called protected time for mental health “life-saving.”
Researchers behind the quiet-vacationing data say the behavior is driven less by laziness than by fear. Two in five workers worry that asking for time off will damage their standing at work.
Whether it’s a fake sick day, a silent beach week, or formal medical leave, the pattern points to the same underlying issue: many people don’t feel safe requesting rest openly. The work itself isn’t necessarily easy—they just don’t trust that honesty will be rewarded.
