⚠️ Productivity illusion: “Ghostworking” is now standard operating procedure in many offices 🧑💻🕵️♂️
Fast Company reports:
📊 58% of U.S. employees say they regularly pretend to work
📞 15% have faked phone calls
📅 12% schedule fake meetings
🎹 22% use keyboards like musical props
Why?
💼 Fear of layoffs
🤖 Unclear expectations post-AI
🔍 Pressure to “look busy” > deliver impact
Ghostworking isn’t about disengagement — it’s about performing productivity in workplaces where clarity, trust, and job security are eroding.
🔒 Surveillance won’t fix it. In fact, it makes it worse.
🧠 The solution? Leadership that focuses on outcomes, not optics.
🤝 Trust, flexibility, and alignment create real engagement, not performative behavior.
The ultimate friction fixing? Subtract a day from work and move to a four-day work week!
Being a good trustee of time (yours and others!) is a primary tenet of the Friction Project by Bob Sutton and Hayagreeva Rao, and it also leaves more space for creativity.
From the article:
For those employees, the results of working one day less every week, with no reduction in pay, have been outstanding:
👍 69% experience reduced burnout
👍 42% have better mental health
👍 37% see improvements in physical health.
👍👍 Thirteen percent of participants say they wouldn’t go back to a five-day schedule for any amount of money.
....
Another way the four-day week makes workers more productive is by allowing them more time to be creative. In his book “Slow Productivity,” Cal Newport, a professor of computer science at Georgetown, explains that the pressure to fill time and appear busy undermines quality and results. He advocates doing fewer things and working at a natural pace.https://youtu.be/z4dan3FSGHQ