How can you measure productivity you can’t see? When we try to evaluate whether someone is “killing it” in their role simply by hearing them mansplain their digital transformation strategy or their AI-powered journey of innovation, it’s hard to disentangle facts from fiction, competence from confidence, and talent from, well, BS.
The harder it is to decipher what someone is doing, the easier it is to fake it. Ironically, this means that the more you get paid for doing what you do—because specialized skills and in-demand jobs tend to involve operating in abstract, intellectual, and symbolic processes rather than visible, tangible, observable work—the harder it is to know if you are any good at it.
Welcome to the modern workplace, where the line between working and pretending to work is not just thin, it’s vanishing. This is particularly true with the advent of AI, which produces content indistinguishable from what humans produce, if not better. If knowledge workers are merely promptly AI and instructing the AI agents to work for them, are humans still working?
WHEN WORK BECAME HARD TO SEE
One of the great historical transitions in the knowledge economy is that as work became more “intellectual,” it also became less visible. Unlike a farmer’s harvest or a blacksmith’s horseshoe, knowledge work is abstract. You can’t see a PowerPoint deck’s impact (if we could, we would probably not devote so many hours in our life to create slides), or touch a well-formatted spreadsheet (though we can admire it, sure). And when results are ambiguous, evaluations become subjective. More importantly, the connection between the behaviors people perform or display (typing, thinking, reading, writing) and the desirable work or organizational outcomes (growth, productivity, innovation, performance) is invisible, which allows people to brag about their apparent accomplishments on LinkedIn and their resumés: “during my tenure we increased profits by 25%” . . .. because of you, despite you, or coincidentally while you were there?
The modern office was once thought to be a factory of ideas, but more often, it is a theater of activity. Slack pings, emails sent at 11:47 p.m., and meetings scheduled for no good reason serve as proxies for productivity. As psychologist Adam Grant noted, we confuse responsiveness with competence. Presence—whether physical or digital—is misread as performance, or even talent.