How 1:1s, daily reports, recurring meetings and employee monitoring can become a second layer of work: proving that work is happening.
An anonymous Japanese blog post made an unexpectedly sharp point.
The writer described having produced daily reports for years while wondering whether anyone actually read them.
Because the post is anonymous, the underlying story cannot be independently verified. That is not the point here.
What matters is why the story feels familiar.
Workplaces have a habit of accumulating rituals:
Daily reports. Weekly reports. Recurring meetings. Morning check-ins. 1:1s. Progress updates. Status dashboards. KPI entry.
Each may begin with a reasonable purpose. Over time, however, the ritual itself can become the work.
That is where a strange second job appears: producing evidence that work is happening.
In 2023, people analytics company Visier surveyed 1,000 full-time U.S. employees about what it calls “productivity theater” — behaviors that create the appearance of being productive without necessarily creating equivalent business value.
Eighty-three percent of respondents said they had engaged in at least one of the identified behaviors during the previous 12 months.
Forty-three percent said they spent more than 10 hours per week on such activities.
Examples included responding immediately when an immediate response was unnecessary, attending meetings they did not need to attend, and prioritizing visible activity.
The interesting part is not that employees are “pretending to work.”
It is that people adapt to the incentives around them.
If visibility is rewarded more consistently than outcomes, visibility becomes a rational strategy.
The organization then creates a second layer of work: not only doing the job, but also demonstrating that the job is being done.
Slack’s State of Work research reported that respondents believed nearly 43% of their meetings could be eliminated without serious adverse consequences.
That does not mean all meetings are useless.
It means meetings can become detached from the problem they were meant to solve.
A meeting for information sharing becomes a round-robin reading of information already available in a dashboard.
A meeting for decisions ends without a decision.
A meeting for problem solving ends with, “We’ll take that away.”
At that point, the meeting is no longer primarily a tool for moving work forward. It becomes evidence that management is taking place.
The same distinction matters for 1:1 meetings.
Manager-direct report 1:1s have become common in many organizations. Yet research focused specifically on the 1:1 format remains limited relative to how widely the practice is used.
A 2022 conceptual review noted that 1:1s have been estimated to account for nearly 47% of workplace meetings, while empirical and theoretical research focused on the format itself is still comparatively sparse.
That does not mean 1:1s are ineffective.
Gallup’s 2026 work on management and span of control emphasizes a different point: employees who receive meaningful feedback at least weekly are far more likely to be engaged.
The useful variable is not necessarily “a scheduled 30-minute 1:1.”
It is meaningful feedback.
That distinction matters.
A 1:1 with a clear purpose can be valuable.
A calendar slot that must be filled because policy says it must exist can become a ritual.
Research on daily stand-up meetings shows a similar pattern.
A 2016 study examined 12 software teams, including 60 interviews and observations of 79 daily stand-up meetings.
Positive attitudes were associated with information sharing and opportunities to discuss and solve problems.
Negative attitudes were associated with status reporting to managers, meetings that occurred too frequently or ran too long, and interruptions to workflow.
The label is the same — “daily stand-up” — but the function can be completely different.
Fifteen minutes for teammates to surface blockers can be useful.
Fifteen minutes in which a manager asks every person, one by one, “What did you do yesterday?” can become a roll call with agile branding.
Remote work and AI have made another response increasingly tempting: if work is less visible, measure more of it.
Logins. Application activity. Screenshots. Keystrokes. Time online.
Technically, much of this is easy to measure.
But measurable and useful are not the same thing.
A meta-analysis published in Personnel Psychology analyzed 94 independent samples covering 23,461 workers.
The authors found no evidence that electronic performance monitoring improved worker performance. Monitoring was, however, associated with higher worker stress. They also found that more transparent and less invasive monitoring was associated with more positive worker attitudes.
“If we can measure it, we can manage it” is an attractive idea.
The problem is that people respond to the metric.
When a metric becomes part of evaluation, behavior shifts toward improving the metric — which may or may not improve the underlying outcome.
Management scholar Eric Abrahamson’s 1996 paper “Management Fashion” offers a useful lens.
He described how management techniques can spread through collective beliefs that a particular method represents the leading edge of management progress, supported by consultants, business media, business schools and other fashion setters.
This does not mean 1:1s, agile practices, KPIs or digital transformation are merely fads.
Many are useful when matched to the right problem.
The risk appears when “we adopted it” becomes an outcome in itself.
We introduced 1:1s. We introduced OKRs. We introduced digital transformation. We introduced AI.
The next question is often, “What percentage of the organization is using it?”
That is where the incentive can become strange.
A company can achieve 100% compliance with a ritual that creates very little value.
AI should be able to reduce administrative work.
It can summarize meetings. Draft reports. Aggregate progress updates. Prepare management summaries.
That is useful.
But if the organization does not question the underlying workflow, AI can also make the theater more efficient.
An employee asks AI to write the daily report. Another AI summarizes the report. A third AI turns the summary into a management briefing. The manager asks yet another AI to extract the three important points.
At some point, a reasonable question appears:
Why does the report exist at all?
There will be a difference between companies that use AI to manufacture evidence of work faster and companies that use AI to remove unnecessary proof-of-work rituals.
The second group is likely to get more of the actual work done.
The answer is not to abolish every report, meeting or management process.
Daily reports can support knowledge sharing. 1:1s can support development and retention. Stand-ups can surface blockers quickly.
The problem is continuing a practice after the original purpose has disappeared.
A useful review can start with five questions:
If those questions cannot be answered, the process deserves scrutiny.
“We’ve always done it” is not a reason.
“Everyone else does it” is not much better.
Talk when conversation is needed. Record what is worth reusing. Meet when a problem requires people in the same room. And spend the rest of the time doing work that creates value.
People who are already doing the work should not also have to manufacture endless proof that they are working.
That may be one category of work we can finally remove from work itself.