We wanted an inside look at office habits across the country, so we surveyed Americans about their behavior at work.
Our national survey covered how often people slack off, bend the truth, snoop, fake being productive, and lean on AI at work, plus how guilty they feel about it.
Responses that represented a naughty habit earned points. We tallied those points by city and by industry to build a 0 to 100 score, where 100 is the naughtiest.
That scoring gave us a clean, like-for-like ranking of 40 metro areas and 20 industries. Nothing was hand-picked, so the winners were discovered, not chosen.
Every habit is broken out by gender, generation, and whether people work in person, hybrid, or remote, which is where the sharpest gaps show up.
A few industries were left out of the ranking because too few people in them took the survey to report a reliable score, including agriculture, architecture, care work, logistics, real estate, and social work.