Why employees are faking productivity?

I used to believe that the surest sign of a healthy team was constant movement. Chats that buzzed late into the night, dashboards that pulsed with activity, calendars packed so tightly that a deep breath felt like a luxury. It looked like dedication. It seemed like momentum. Then I watched bright people burn out while the work that mattered slipped quietly out of reach. That was when I learned a humbling truth. People will perform motion when motion is what the culture rewards. They will perform presence when presence is treated as value. What looks like productivity often turns out to be a costume stitched together from meetings, messages, and status updates. Under that costume sits a more complicated story about fear, incentives, and the signals leaders send without meaning to.

The surface pattern is easy to recognize once you know what to look for. Team members craft long updates to prove that they have covered every angle. They join meetings that offer little substance because attendance feels safer than absence. They add comments to documents to be seen contributing, even when a single decisive line would have done the job. They keep one window open for the tool that tracks activity and another for the tool that tracks hours because the scoreboard is watching. None of this is driven by laziness. It is driven by a rational response to an environment where visibility is mistaken for value. The human brain tunes itself to whatever earns approval. In a culture that praises speed of reply and continuity of presence, the brain learns to optimize for those attributes, even if the work itself creeps forward only in short, exhausted spurts.

Leaders rarely set out to design this outcome. More often they teach it accidentally. They celebrate the teammate who responds at midnight while overlooking the quiet builder who prevents a problem from returning. They conduct reviews that ask for evidence of effort rather than evidence of outcomes. They say they want ownership but step in at the last minute to redirect, leaving the team unsure whether to take initiative or to hedge. The result is mixed signals. Mixed signals produce defensive behavior. Defensive behavior produces theater. And theater is expensive. It consumes hours, attention, and morale, yet it buys very little progress.

The psychology beneath the theater is not hard to trace. Most of us would rather be accused of trying too hard than of choosing the wrong priority. In a confusing environment, overpreparation feels like insurance. The thicker the slide deck, the safer the meeting. The longer the task list, the easier it is to prove that we have been diligent. The detail becomes a shield against criticism. The shield grows heavier with each review and sprint, and before long the team spends more energy carrying the shield than moving the work. This is how good people get lost in performance habits that keep them busy without moving the needle.

Scale amplifies the problem. In a five person team the line from effort to outcome is visible to everyone. A customer writes in, a bug is fixed, the user smiles, and the loop is closed. In a fifty person team the loop stretches across functions and time zones. If leadership does not redraw the map of how value flows, the team fills the gap with whatever wins short term approval. The product can become a stage where the most impressive demo wins, even if the demo papers over a root cause. The calendar becomes a stage where attendance substitutes for alignment. The chat channel becomes a stage where speed substitutes for thoughtfulness. The metrics look healthy because the instruments measure noise. Then a quarter ends and the truth shows up in missed revenue or a customer who slips away without a fight.

This is not only a Western or Silicon Valley story. In Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and across the Gulf, I have watched fast growing companies add tools to regain a sense of control as headcount climbs. Each new layer of coordination seems harmless on its own. A weekly status call to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. A dashboard to keep leaders informed. A channel to help a new cross functional project stay aligned. The cumulative effect is heavy. People begin to manage their appearance across tools and meeting rooms. Managers begin to manage by proof of presence rather than by outcomes. No one designed the system to reward fakery, but the signals drifted until performance became safer than progress.

If leaders want a different result, they must first write a different contract with their teams. The contract sounds simple. Clarify the few outcomes that matter. Protect the work that serves those outcomes. Reward the person who solves a problem without a show. Tolerate the mess that accompanies honest prioritization, because real prioritization means saying no to good ideas in order to serve great ones. Most leaders agree with this in principle. The struggle begins when the calendar is full, the quarter is loud, and the temptation to ask for proof of effort returns. It is easier to count visible activity than to trace value. It is easier to demand another update than to make a hard tradeoff. It is easier to praise the person who looks busiest than to notice the one who quietly removed a recurring source of pain. Every easy choice invites theater back into the room.

The practical shift starts with language. In standups, ask what got better for the user rather than what was done. In reviews, ask what the team learned that should change the next move rather than how many tasks were completed. In one to ones, ask what feels unsafe to say out loud and then carry some of that risk with your teammate in the next leadership forum. Psychological safety is not a slogan on a slide. It is a leader taking heat alongside the team when a brave choice does not land perfectly. Once people believe that truth beats performance, they stop padding timelines, stop gilding updates, and start surfacing risk early enough to address it.

The next shift involves constraints. Fewer simultaneous bets create less pressure to perform activity across too many fronts. When each person has one or two clear outcomes, they no longer need to spray their attention across five channels to prove they are helpful. They can decline meetings that do not serve their outcomes. They can give honest updates instead of ornate ones. They can ask for help before the cliff rather than after the fall, because the quality of judgment is what will be rewarded, not the quality of theater.

Measurement must evolve as well. If you measure individuals by activity but evaluate teams by outcomes, individuals will protect themselves first. That is human. Align the stories of recognition with the outcomes you claim to value and the behavior will follow. Celebrate a customer who renews without a discount. Celebrate a bug that stops resurfacing. Celebrate the removal of a process that was slowing the system. These stories are not flashy, but they teach the team what matters. Over time, people learn to pursue the quiet signals of progress rather than the noisy signals of presence.

There is a difference between transparency and surveillance that leaders must respect. Transparency is the team showing how value moves through the work. Surveillance is the team proving that they are always available. The first builds trust. The second breeds anxiety. Anxiety drives performance habits. Performance habits produce busy calendars and ornate updates. None of that ships. A leader who insists on transparency without slipping into surveillance will learn more, sooner, with less drama.

Regional culture deserves attention here. In many Malaysian and Singaporean workplaces, people are taught to read hierarchy before they read the stated goal. When the boss enters the room, the goal becomes less about moving the work and more about avoiding disapproval. In rapidly scaling companies in the Gulf, a new layer of managers often inherits teams before they have learned how to set clear outcomes and to coach rather than audit. These dynamics do not doom a team to theater, but they do raise the bar for leaders who want to create a culture where the real work is safe to show. Leaders must demonstrate the conversations they want their managers to run, and they must reward those managers for outcome coaching rather than status policing.

If you suspect your team is performing work, invite them to design a week in which performance would be pointless. Ask which meetings would vanish if outcomes were the only score. Ask which documents would shrink if the intended audience were a new teammate who needs clarity rather than a skeptical reviewer who demands proof. Ask where a simple, courageous decision is being delayed because the safer play is to gather more evidence. Then change at least one of your own habits to make their answers valid. If you routinely answer messages within minutes at all hours, the team will infer that speed outranks thoughtfulness. If you praise late nights more often than you praise early fixes, the team will perform fatigue for you. In both cases you are the loudest signal in the room.

I once helped a founder in Kuala Lumpur rewrite her leadership contract with the company. She replaced long status calls with short outcome conversations. She limited simultaneous projects so people could give depth to their work. She asked every new initiative to write down the bet it was making and the moment when the team would decide whether the bet paid off. The first few weeks were awkward. The meetings felt too quiet. The dashboards looked thin. Then the noise faded and the work moved. People declined meetings that no longer served the goals. They closed loops that had been left open for months. They began to narrate value rather than presence. The company became calmer, and strangely, faster.

Skeptics often worry that a focus on outcomes creates room for free riders. The opposite is true when the work is visible as value. In a system that rewards motion, free riders learn how to look busy. In a system that rewards progress, there is nowhere to hide. The show stops paying dividends. The energy that once went into performance returns to the product, the customer, and the craft. This is not a naive hope. It is what happens when a team believes it will be judged on truth rather than theater.

The question that began this reflection was simple. Why are employees faking productivity. The answer is not that they are lazy or cynical. The answer is that they are smart. They study what the culture buys and they sell exactly that. If the culture buys presence, they will sell presence. If the culture buys motion, they will sell motion. If the culture buys careful noise, they will sell careful noise. Change what you buy and you will change what you get. Buy progress. Buy clarity. Buy fewer, truer bets. Buy the courage to tell the truth about what is working and what is not. When you do, performance will lose its market value, and real work will step forward again, quieter than the show and far more powerful.