How to stop your team from faking productivity

I learned the hard way that activity can eat a company from the inside. Our Slack was alive, Asana boards looked pristine, and weekly demos were packaged like TV. The only missing piece was the part that keeps a business alive. Nothing meaningful reached users. The team was not lazy. They were protecting themselves inside a system that rewarded looking busy more than delivering value. That is how The Task Masking Trend creeps in. It is not a character flaw. It is a design flaw.

In early stage teams across Malaysia, Singapore, and Riyadh, I keep seeing the same pattern. Founders install tools to chase clarity. Middle managers translate that into reporting hygiene. Individual contributors learn that high visibility on tickets, comments, and meetings gets them praised for collaboration. The pipeline fills with small tasks that feel safe. Big outcomes slip because big outcomes attract blame. Add remote schedules and different comfort levels with confrontation, and you get a workday that is full and somehow empty.

What makes task masking seductive is that it feels responsible. Break the work down. Talk about dependencies. Share status updates. All good habits in moderation. The mask forms when the habits become the goal. A designer spends two days reorganizing Figma components to look professional for handoff. An engineer slices a story into six tickets that move to In Progress but never reach Done. A product marketer builds a research deck that could win an award, then delays the landing page because the brief needs more alignment. Everyone is working. No one is shipping.

The deeper cause is not laziness. It is fear. Vague outcomes raise the risk of public failure, so people retreat to tasks where success is easy to claim. A second cause is fuzzy ownership. When three smart people can all say they own something, no one owns the final mile. A third cause is incentive design. If the loudest praise goes to the best communicators and the neatest dashboards, the team optimizes for communication and dashboards. None of this is evil. It is rational.

My moment of clarity came when a client in Riyadh asked a simple question. What did you ship last week that a user touched? I looked at our beautiful board and realized I could not answer without telling a story. That was the problem. A real outcome should not need a story. It should be visible. A payment page loads faster. A dashboard shows correct data. A buyer can check out on mobile with one less step. If your progress needs a floor show, you have progress theater, not progress.

Here is the rebuild that worked for us, and later for the founders I mentor. It is a set of four switches. They look small. They change everything because they force the team to face output without shame.

The first switch is the outcome clock. Stop measuring weeks by meetings or tickets closed. Measure them by value released to a user, even if the unit is modest. Ask one question at the end of each week. What changed in the product or service that a real user could notice without being told? Write the answers in a public release log that lives beside your roadmap, not inside a private channel. When the log is empty, do not perform. Ask what blocked release and fix that block on Monday morning, not at the end of the quarter.

The second switch is the owner of record. When a project matters, appoint one human who carries the last mile. That person does not do all the work. They guard the definition of done and control the batons across functions. Their name sits on the release log next to the outcome, not next to the task list. Ownership is not a feeling. It is accountability for the final mile. If someone is uncomfortable with that, you have found a training need or a fit problem. Avoid the committee temptation. Committees mask risk. Owners surface it.

The third switch is a definition of done that a non domain person can verify in three steps. Ours looked like this. The thing works in production, not staging. The thing has a simple check a founder can perform without engineering tools. The thing is documented in one place that a new teammate can find in under a minute. This forces clarity. It reduces the space where people hide inside quality language and process talk. Done is not a mood. It is a check you can run.

The fourth switch is weekly user proof. In teams that serve consumers, this can be a screen recording, a live URL, a before and after metric. In B2B service teams, make it a client visible artifact that required two emails less than last time. The point is to produce evidence that lives outside your internal narrative. You do not argue with a working flow. You show it.

These switches only work if you pair them with safety. In Southeast Asia and KSA, leaders will recognize how respect and harmony shape the room. If you do not make it safe to say I am blocked, your team will always choose the safer task. Create a standing blocker ritual that lasts fifteen minutes. No speeches. Each owner names one block and one ask. You decide in the room. If it needs a deeper debate, you schedule it and protect the owner from drift. The ritual trains people that truth is faster than performance.

You will also need to retrain middle managers. Many were promoted for being excellent individual contributors who communicated well. Teach them to celebrate release, not activity. When a manager praises a beautiful plan that did not ship, they train masking. When they praise a simple release that unblocks a customer, even if the plan was messy, they train delivery. Do performance reviews that anchor on shipped outcomes and released value, not only participation and collaboration. Keep collaboration as a value. Just do not let it outrank delivery.

Replace performative dashboards with a release wall. It is a page that lists every weekly release with a link, the owner of record, and a one line user impact. Keep it ugly. Do not let a designer polish it into a brand asset. The uglier it looks, the more honest it will stay. People should feel slightly exposed, and also supported. That is the sweet spot where masking loses power. If you are tempted to add more graphs, resist. The wall is not for performance. It is for memory and momentum.

If your team is already deep in task masking, your first week should be a reset, not a crackdown. Select one project that matters and commit to a tiny release by Friday noon. The goal is to rebuild trust in shipping. Clear calendars. Make a real tradeoff visible. Tell the team what you are dropping for the week and why. At noon, ship the smallest slice that a user can touch. Put it on the wall. Name the owner. Say thank you. The following week, do it again with a different project. Consistency matters more than heroics.

There is a human layer you cannot skip. Task masking often hides exhaustion, fear of critique, or confusion about priorities. Have an honest conversation with the two or three people who carry the most invisible glue in your team. They can usually name where the mask is thickest. Listen without defending the system you created. If you find that you are the bottleneck because everyone waits for your final word, pull yourself out of one approval chain this week and let the owner decide. If the outcome is not perfect, ship and learn. You can refine next week.

If I had to do it again, I would set these switches on day one. I would define the release wall before I defined the OKR sheet. I would hire managers who are calm about shipping imperfectly and relentless about learning quickly. I would tell new hires our culture in one line. We reward released value and honest blockers. Everything else is preference. When you build that culture early, task masking does not find oxygen. People still have bad days, and projects still slip, but no one needs to perform productivity to feel safe.

The task masking trend will not disappear. Tools will keep multiplying and meetings will always offer a soft place to hide. The fix is not a new tool. It is a simple operating truth. Outcomes earn trust. Activity does not. Build a system that makes outcomes visible, safe, and frequent. Your team will stop faking productivity because they will not need to. They will have a better way to belong.