Invisible work: who in the team does what nobody counts

“So who bought the present for Maja?”

The question comes on Friday afternoon, when the cake is already on the table and the card has been signed. Everyone looks at Petra. Of course it was Petra. Petra collected the money, chose the present, reminded the three people who forgot to sign and made sure Maja found out nothing. Petra is also the one who takes the minutes at meetings, who showed the new colleague where everything is, who calmed the client down when the manager was on holiday, and who knows who isn’t speaking to whom and why. At her annual review, not a word will be said about any of this. They will talk about her projects — and about how she was a little slower on one of them than she should have been.

What Petra does is called invisible work. It is not hidden in the sense that nobody sees it. Everyone knows the present has been bought and the minutes written. It is invisible in another sense: it does not count. It is not in the job description, not in the objectives, not in the appraisal. It only gets noticed when someone stops doing it.

Work that appears in no spreadsheet

In English it has come to be called office housework. It covers tasks that are essential for the team but bring the person who does them nothing that would show when it comes to promotion: organising events, taking minutes, tidying shared folders, onboarding newcomers, covering for absent colleagues, sitting on committees whose reports nobody reads, and making sure there is coffee in the kitchen.

There is an even quieter layer, though. In the late 1990s Joyce Fletcher observed women engineers at a technology company and described everything they did so that the team could function at all: they anticipated problems before they arose, connected people who needed to talk to each other, helped colleagues understand what was expected of them, and smoothed over tensions. She called this relational practice. And she noticed something she also put into the title of her book — Disappearing Acts: this work kept disappearing. Not because it did not exist, but because others experienced it as niceness or personality rather than competence. “That’s just how Petra is.”

That may be the most important sentence in this article. When we attribute work to personality, we stop seeing it as work. And what is not work needs neither thanks nor pay nor relief.

Invisible work was not born in the office

If some of this sounds familiar from home, that is no coincidence. In the 1980s the American sociologist Arlie Hochschild followed couples in which both partners were employed and carefully recorded who did what at home. She calculated that, on top of their paid jobs, employed women did roughly an extra month of work a year in housework and childcare compared with their husbands — a month of twenty-four-hour days. She called it “the second shift”.

Later researchers showed that the hardest part is not necessarily the part that can be measured in hours. In 2019 the sociologist Allison Daminger broke down the mental side of running a household: anticipating what will be needed, identifying options, deciding and monitoring whether it got done. In her study women more often took on the anticipating and the monitoring, while couples shared the decisions more evenly. In other words: he chooses between three nurseries, but she was the one who thought a nursery needed finding, and she knows when the deadline is. In the knowledge base I describe this under the mental load.

The office often simply extends this logic. Who remembers that it will be Maja’s birthday? Who notices that the new colleague is lost? Who knows the client needs a call before they get angry? These are the same mental tasks — except that at home, at least sometimes, someone sees them.

Who does it — and why

In 2017 the economists Linda Babcock, Maria Recalde, Lise Vesterlund and Laurie Weingart published a study that put this on solid ground. They were interested in what they call tasks with low promotability: they benefit the organisation, but nobody who makes career decisions is in a position to notice them.

First they looked at who at a university volunteers when an email asks for someone to join a committee. Women volunteered more often. Then, in the laboratory, they formed groups in which someone had to take on a task that benefited everyone but benefited the person doing it least. In mixed groups, women again volunteered more often. But when the groups were all women or all men, the difference disappeared. Finally they looked at who gets asked: here too, women were chosen more often — and when asked, they more often said yes.

That last part is key. It is not that women have an innate love of minute-taking. It is about an expectation we all share: that she will do it. When everyone expects someone to say “I’ll do it”, that someone does say it — otherwise an awkward silence hangs in the air, and she feels it as her responsibility.

The researchers later distilled their experience into a book, The No Club, which grew out of their own “club”: they met in order to learn to say no. I find this detail important. They knew everything they had researched. And it was still hard for them.

A role you were given before you arrived

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we see the family as a system of roles. Every system needs someone who makes sure it does not fall apart — and that role is often taken on by the person who learned it earliest. A child who had to grow up sooner than they should have, comforting their mother, looking after younger siblings or making sure their parents did not fight, grows into an adult who notices other people’s needs before they are spoken. In the knowledge base I describe this under parentification, and I wrote about family roles in Roles in the family: the hero, the scapegoat, the invisible child. Which was yours?

People like this are invaluable at work. And that is precisely why invisible work piles up on them by itself. Not because anyone is exploiting them, but because a system that has someone who notices everything adapts to it. Others stop noticing, because they know someone will. This is what systemic therapy calls balance: roles complement each other, and each one holds the other in place.

For the one who does the caring, this has a cost that often goes unnoticed until the very end. A sense of worth becomes tied to being needed. If nobody asks them for anything, they are not sure they matter at all. I wrote about this in People-pleasing: when your worth is in other people’s hands and Worth only as much as you get done. If the role that feels closer to you is that of the person who holds the team together emotionally too, read When you’re the one holding the team together — and it slowly empties you.

What invisible work costs

Organisational psychology has a name for voluntary work beyond the job description: organisational citizenship behaviour. In the 1980s Dennis Organ described it as something valuable that keeps organisations going. And it is valuable. But in 2005 Mark Bolino and William Turnley looked at the other side: among employees who took on the most extra initiative, they found more role overload, more job stress and more conflict between work and family.

The cost builds up quietly. First it is time: invisible work gets done in between the real work, which then runs late or spills into evenings. Then it is your career: when a promotion comes up, those who were working on visible projects in the meantime are at the front of the queue. And finally it is what I hear most often in the therapy room: resentment. The quiet, embarrassed resentment of someone who did all this voluntarily — and now feels foolish for expecting anyone to notice.

It is no coincidence that among those who burn out we often find the most reliable people of all. I wrote about this in Why it is the most responsible and reliable people who burn out.

When you say no

The hardest part is not saying no. The hardest part is staying with the moment after you have said it — the silence, the look, the feeling that you have let someone down. This is how it might go (composed, not a real person):

“Petra, will you take the minutes again? You’re the best at it.”
“Not this month. I’ve taken them for the last eight meetings, and it makes it hard for me to follow the discussion.”
“Oh. Well… who then?”
“I suggest we take turns. I can draw up a rota, but after that I’m not running it.”
A short silence. “Fine. Marko, will you start?”

Notice what Petra did not do. She did not apologise. She did not explain how tired she was and how nobody appreciated her. She stated a fact (eight meetings), said what it costs her (following the discussion), and proposed a solution that was not “I’ll do it”. She offered a rota — one last piece of invisible work, but one that comes to an end.

That short silence matters too. The silence is exactly the point at which Petra always used to volunteer. When she doesn’t fill it, someone else has to. You will find more sentences that help in moments like this in the tool sentences for setting boundaries.

Exercise: an inventory of invisible work

You cannot share out invisible work until you can see it yourself. This exercise takes two weeks and needs only a notebook or a note on your phone.

1. Write it down as you go. For two weeks, record every task that is not in your job description: minutes, “just a minute” requests, onboarding, organising, calming people down, reminding others. Including the ones that take two minutes.
2. Mark who sees it. Next to each one, note whether the person who evaluates your work knows about it. Yes or no.
3. Mark how it reached you. Were you asked? Did you volunteer because the silence went on too long? Did you do it because “it’s always you anyway”?
4. Choose one to hand back. From the tasks nobody sees and that you took on because of a silence, choose one. Just one. Think about whom you could pass it to, or how it could rotate.
5. Prepare one sentence. Write down a sentence for the next time you are asked, for example: “I can’t this time, I have a deadline on Friday. I suggest we take turns.” Say it out loud, so that it is there when you need it.

The inventory has one more benefit. Once you have a list, you can show it to your manager — not as a complaint, but as information. Many managers genuinely do not know about this part of the work.

And one more thing: don’t be surprised if handing tasks back feels uncomfortable. The psychologist Harriet Lerner described how a system responds to one member’s change with pressure to go back to the old ways — not out of malice, but because the old ways were comfortable for everyone. That pressure is a sign that something is shifting, not that you are doing something wrong. I wrote more broadly about getting past this inner resistance in Setting boundaries: why it feels selfish even though healthy relationships depend on it.

What the team can do

Invisible work is not just the problem of an individual who cannot say no. It is a problem of distribution. That is why one person alone cannot fully solve it — but a manager or a team can do a great deal.

Babcock and her colleagues suggest a few simple measures that require no special policy:

• Don’t ask “could someone?” A request for a volunteer almost always lands with the same people. It is better to assign tasks — and to do so in turn.
• Make a list. Write down all the recurring tasks that are in no job description. Simply writing them down makes them visible.
• Count this too. In annual reviews, also ask what each person did for the team — and take it into account.
• Notice who always says yes. If it is always the same person, don’t give them yet another task; ask them what they could hand over.

If you are a manager and someone’s name from your team flashed through your mind as you read this, that is probably a good place to start.

Where this view does not hold

It would not be fair if I did not say where this story has its limits.

Not all invisible work is an injustice. Some people enjoy caring for the team and find meaning in it. A team in which everyone counted every minute they gave to others would not be a pleasant place. The question is not whether we should stop caring for each other, but whether that care is shared in a way that neither exhausts anyone nor holds anyone back.

It is not always about gender. Research shows that women take on these tasks more often, but that does not mean men don’t. Invisible work is also done by younger colleagues who don’t dare say no, by people on insecure contracts and by those who are the only one who is different in their team. What matters is who has the least power to refuse.

Sometimes invisible work is a refuge. This is uncomfortable to admit, but it happens in the therapy room: someone takes on small tasks because they are afraid of big ones. As long as I’m organising, I don’t have to present my own project. If you recognise something of this in yourself, the question is a different one — not how to lighten your load, but what you are avoiding.

And sometimes the problem cannot be solved in your team. If an organisation systematically fails to see the work you do, and nothing changes after your proposal, that is information too. Not about you, but about the place you are in.

What to remember

• Invisible work is the tasks that hold a team up but do not count in appraisals or promotion.
• When we attribute work to personality (“that’s just how she is”), we stop seeing it as work — and stop sharing it.
• Research shows women do it more often, mainly because we all expect them to — women included.
• The role of the one who notices everything is often learned at home; at work the system simply accepts it.
• What helps most is writing tasks down and rotating them — instead of asking “could someone?”.