You see the meeting on the calendar, the report that lands in your inbox and the project that gets completed on time.
But what did it take to get there?
Someone scheduled the meeting, figured out who needed to attend and prepared the information everyone would need. Behind the report, someone built the spreadsheet, gathered the data, followed up on missing information and worked through the discrepancies. Along the way, someone kept track of the details, anticipated the next step or noticed a potential problem before it became one.
The finished product is visible. Much of the work behind it may not be.
As a leader, how much work is happening on your team that you don’t actually see?
What Does Invisible Work Look Like in the Workplace?
Invisible work isn’t necessarily secret work. Often, everyone knows that an employee is responsible for a particular outcome.
What’s less obvious is everything required to produce it.
Research into invisible work has expanded the concept beyond its origins in unpaid household labour. In today’s workplace, it can include organizational tasks, mentoring, managing interpersonal dynamics, providing emotional support and other behind-the-scenes activities that help organizations function.
It can be practical:
- Coordinating schedules
- Preparing agendas
- Building or maintaining spreadsheets
- Following up for information
- Documenting processes
- Keeping track of deadlines and details
It can also be relational:
- Helping a new employee get up to speed
- Mentoring a colleague
- Being the person coworkers approach when they need help
- Navigating a difficult interpersonal situation
- Maintaining relationships across teams
Individually, these things may not seem significant. Collectively, they can represent a substantial amount of someone’s workload.
Why Is Invisible Work So Easy to Miss?
Leaders naturally pay attention to things they can measure.
Deadlines. Hours. Deliverables. Results. Performance targets.
Those things matter, but they don’t necessarily capture all the effort required to achieve them.
Consider a month-end close that goes smoothly. The visible outcome is that everything was completed accurately and on time. Behind that outcome may have been reminders, follow-ups, reconciliations, corrections, conversations with other departments, problem-solving and decisions about what needed attention first.
Ironically, the better someone becomes at managing all of that, the easier it can be to overlook.
When things consistently run smoothly, we can forget that someone is helping make them run smoothly.
Who Is Carrying the Work Behind the Work?
Invisible work doesn’t necessarily get distributed evenly.
It can gravitate toward the people who are good at it.
The organized employee gets asked to coordinate the next project. The approachable employee becomes everyone’s sounding board. The person with strong institutional knowledge becomes the unofficial trainer. The employee who anticipates problems starts quietly preventing them before anyone else knows they existed.
Being dependable can gradually create more responsibility.
The question for leaders isn’t whether employees should ever contribute outside the narrow boundaries of their job descriptions. Collaborative workplaces depend on people helping one another.
The question is whether the same people are continually absorbing these responsibilities without that contribution being recognized when you consider their workload and capacity.
Does the Workday Always End When the Workday Ends?
Not all invisible work happens at a desk.
Sometimes the difficult problem an employee couldn’t solve at 4:30 is still turning over in their mind while they’re driving home. The answer to a reconciliation problem might suddenly occur while they’re washing dishes. Tomorrow’s difficult conversation may be occupying their thoughts as they’re trying to fall asleep.
They’re not technically working. But work is still consuming some of their mental capacity.
This doesn’t mean employers should attempt to measure every minute an employee thinks about work outside working hours. Nor is every passing thought about work a problem.
It does mean that workload is more complex than the number of tasks on someone’s to-do list.
Some responsibilities require very little mental energy once they’re complete. Others continue occupying attention long after someone has stepped away from their computer.
Why Does Invisible Work Matter?
When invisible work isn’t considered, leaders can unintentionally underestimate how much someone is carrying.
An employee’s visible workload might look manageable while the coordination, follow-up, problem-solving and support surrounding that workload are consuming significant time and attention.
That can matter when you’re assigning another project, evaluating performance, discussing career development or wondering why a previously enthusiastic employee suddenly seems stretched.
It can matter for recognition too.
If one employee consistently creates the structures that help everyone else work more effectively, that contribution has value even when it isn’t easily represented by a completed task or performance metric.
How Can Leaders Start Seeing Invisible Work?
Recognizing invisible work doesn’t require tracking every task or turning mental load into another performance metric.
It starts with curiosity.
Look beyond the final deliverable and ask what it took to get there.
When you’re discussing workload with an employee, don’t focus only on the projects listed on their plate. Ask what else they are coordinating, following up on or helping others with.
Pay attention to who people consistently turn to for answers, support and institutional knowledge.
Notice who prepares, organizes and anticipates.
And when someone makes a difficult process look easy, resist assuming that it actually is.
What Should You Do Once You See It?
Recognition is a good start, but awareness should also influence how work is distributed.
If the same employee always takes notes, organizes the meeting, trains the new hire or keeps a project on track, consider whether those responsibilities could be shared.
If an employee has become the team’s unofficial source of knowledge, ask whether some of that knowledge should be documented or transferred rather than continually relying on one person.
And when invisible contributions are genuinely valuable to the organization, make sure they aren’t invisible during conversations about performance, recognition and advancement.
The goal isn’t to eliminate the work behind the work. Much of it is essential.
The goal is to make sure essential work doesn’t remain overlooked simply because someone is very good at doing it.
What Work Are You Not Seeing?
The most valuable contributions on your team aren’t always the easiest ones to measure.
Sometimes they’re the spreadsheet that made a decision possible, the question someone thought to ask before a problem developed, the colleague who helped everyone else understand a new process or the quiet coordination that kept a project moving.
As a leader, you may never see every piece of work that goes into keeping your team functioning.
But you can become better at looking for it.
And when you understand more of the work behind the work, you can make better decisions about workload, recognition, development and how responsibilities are shared across your team.
Build a Team Where Contributions Are Recognized
Understanding what your employees contribute is an important part of building and retaining a strong accounting and finance team.
If you’re hiring in Winnipeg or thinking about how the right people can strengthen your team, Mercer Bradley can help you find accounting and finance professionals whose skills and contributions support where your organization is headed.
