Your People Aren't Lazy. They've Learned Exactly What You Reward.

This isn't a productivity problem. It's a theatre.

The term productivity theatre was coined by the workforce analytics firm Visier in 2023, describing what happens when employees prioritise performative work over work that actually moves the business forward. Their research found that 83% of workers admitted to at least one performative behaviour in the previous year. Almost half – 43% – said they now spend more than 10 hours per week on it.

That's more than a full working day. Every week. Gone.

The performance has a price. You're already paying it.

Visier's numbers aren't an outlier. A global study by Slack and Qualtrics – 18,000 desk workers across nine countries – found that employees spend an average of 32% of their time on performative work that doesn't contribute to company or team goals. In the UK, Slack's follow-on research put the number at 33%, with 37% of workers reporting that their productivity is measured purely on visibility metrics – hours in the office, hours online, speed of reply.

So take a quarter to a third of every salary on your payroll. That's what you're spending on work nobody asked for, work nobody reads, and work nobody will miss when it's gone.

It's not in the P&L. It's not in the board deck. But it's the single largest line item in your organization, and nobody's tracking it.

The performance exists because someone keeps clapping.

Here's the uncomfortable bit. Performances require audiences.

When Visier asked workers who they were performing for, 70% pointed to their direct manager. 32% named department leads. 29% pointed directly at senior leadership. Nobody is engaging in elaborate visibility rituals for their own amusement. They are doing it because they've correctly identified what gets rewarded – and what gets quietly overlooked.

Harvard Business School professor Ethan Bernstein documented this dynamic in a now-famous study of a Chinese mobile phone factory. He found that workers had developed faster, safer, better ways of doing their jobs – but reverted to the official, slower methods the moment a manager walked past. The improvements only emerged in the spaces where no one was watching. The performance was the cost of being observed.

The pattern holds across every industry and every level. When leaders measure what is visible, they get more of what is visible. When they reward the appearance of effort, they get the appearance of effort. This isn't a moral failing on the part of employees. It's a rational response to a flawed signal.

Your people aren't gaming the system. They're reading it.

Surveillance doesn't produce output. It produces performances.

For leaders who suspect this is happening, the reflex is often to tighten the grip – add monitoring, tracking, check-ins. The research is clear that this makes things dramatically worse. Visier found that 61% of workers at companies using surveillance tools engaged in productivity theatre, compared to just 12% at companies without them. Workers under surveillance were two to three times more likely to commit the most egregious performative acts – keeping a laptop screen awake while not working, exaggerating status updates, offloading tasks to a colleague so they could be seen doing something more visible.

More watching produces more performing. That's the whole loop.

It also produces something quieter and harder to measure: resentment. Workers who feel they have to perform for their manager begin to direct serious energy away from the work itself. That energy has to come from somewhere. It comes from the thinking, the problem-solving, the judgement – exactly the things you hired them for.

The people who can't stand theatre are the people you can't afford to lose.

There's a specific kind of employee who is allergic to this environment. They are, almost without exception, your best people.

High performers can spot the distance between activity and outcome faster than anyone else. They know when a meeting could have been a message. They know which reports are written for the person who requested them and read by no one else. They know which rituals exist because someone, somewhere, years ago, decided they should. And they know exactly how much of their week is spent feeding those rituals instead of doing work that matters. Slack's Workforce Lab research found that 41% of desk workers' time goes to tasks that are "low value, repetitive, or lack meaningful contribution to their core job functions."

Your top performers notice this first. They tolerate it for a while, because they're professional. And then they stop tolerating it.

What you're left with is the people who are comfortable with the performance. Who'd rather look busy than be held to an outcome. Who have, quietly and correctly, identified that the system rewards motion over results – and optimised their careers accordingly.

You cannot consultant your way out of this.

There's no framework that fixes this. No new tool. No offsite. The fix is embarrassingly simple, which is part of why so few organizations actually do it.

Start rewarding outcomes instead of visibility. Measure what was delivered, not what was attended. Kill the reports nobody reads. Cancel the meetings that exist only because they've always existed. Stop treating response time as a proxy for commitment. Stop treating a full calendar as evidence of a full contribution.

This isn't radical. Slack's own research found that workers themselves say 43% of their meetings could be eliminated with no negative consequences. The people doing the work already know which rituals are theatre. They're waiting for permission to stop performing them.

Give it to them.

They're not lazy. They're very good at what you taught them.

The hardest part of all this isn't diagnosing it. It's admitting that the theatre exists because leadership keeps buying tickets.

Your people aren't lazy. They aren't disengaged. They aren't trying to cheat you. They've simply learned, with great precision, what you reward – and they've become very, very good at giving it to you.

The question isn't whether your organization runs on productivity theatre. It does. The question is whether you're willing to stop clapping.