Working hard or hardly working? More than half of workers have sent unneeded emails or messages just to show they are doing something

What happened

A new workplace survey reported by TechRadar finds that more than half of office workers admit to sending emails or messages they didn't actually need to send, purely to signal that they are busy and engaged with their work. The behaviour reflects a growing pressure among employees, particularly those working remotely or hybrid, to visibly demonstrate productivity rather than simply deliver outcomes.

The research points to a broader shift in how work is perceived and measured in distributed teams: with fewer opportunities for informal, in-person visibility, employees are turning to digital activity — messages, status updates, "just checking in" emails — as a substitute for being seen at a desk.

Why it matters

This is fundamentally a story about behavioural economics inside the workplace: when visibility becomes a proxy for value, people optimise for the signal rather than the substance. That same dynamic shapes customer-facing service environments, where staff can feel pressure to look busy for supervisors or dashboards rather than focus on the interaction that actually matters to the customer.

For service design and employee experience teams, the finding is a warning sign about how performance metrics and monitoring tools shape behaviour. If systems reward observable activity over genuine outcomes, they risk manufacturing "productivity theatre" — busywork that consumes time and attention without improving service quality, decision-making or customer outcomes.

The Renascence take

Most coverage will frame this as a story about trust, hybrid work or employee wellbeing. The more useful lens is measurement design: this is what happens when an organisation cannot see effort directly and substitutes a weak proxy — message volume — for it.

Any environment that rewards visible activity over verified outcomes will eventually train people to perform activity instead of delivering it — this is as true on a customer service floor as it is in a remote inbox. Leaders should audit what their systems and managers actually reward: response counts and "always online" signals, or resolved problems and satisfied customers. If the former is easier to measure than the latter, expect employees — and eventually service quality — to bend toward whatever is being watched.