Why your coworker is pretending to be so busy

• Worries about layoffs and AI taking jobs could push workers to engage in productivity theater.
• It's the act of demonstrating busyness to look good in front of higher-ups at work.
• Yet looking busy and actually being productive aren't always the same thing.

When Taylor Goucher was in the military, he used to joke with colleagues about a lieutenant colonel who would scan the parking lot at the end of the day to see whose cars were still there.

If he saw yours there, he considered you to be working hard.

Years later, Goucher sees a corporate version of the same phenomenon playing out. This time, the displays of effort might be the number of early-morning emails a worker sends or the number of meetings they attend.

Productivity theater — the act of demonstrating busyness as a way to look good — has always existed. Yet rolling layoffs, a stubbornly tight job market, and intensifying fears about AI displacing workers are pushing some workers to be more conspicuous in how they go about their 9-to-5.

Worries about AI and tools that track workers' output have "amplified the pressure on people to look more productive," Goucher, VP of sales and marketing at Connext Global, an offshoring firm, told Business Insider.

'Going through the motions'

Joe Fontana, a sales consultant on Long Island, sees a similar pattern. In sales teams that adopt task-automation tools, workers can send more emails and conduct faster research on prospective clients. That might mean sending 500 messages to 50,000 people in three minutes, he said.

"You showed me how busy you can be," Fontana told Business Insider. Yet, he said, those auto-generated messages —"longer than three books of the Bible" — might not actually drive sales.

Simply going faster or checking more items off a list doesn't necessarily mean sales reps are having substantive conversations with would-be customers.

"They're just showing that they're going through the motions," Fontana said.

Teams that focus too much on metrics tied to volume aren't necessarily identifying real decision-makers, understanding what's keeping them up at night, and how a product might help, he said.

Nevertheless, Fontana said, high-volume work can dupe bosses.

"'Billy makes 100 dials a day. Billy does 50 emails a day. Billy does two hours in Slack, an hour in LinkedIn. Look how busy he is. The numbers will come,'" he said. "The numbers never come."

Setting better goals

Goucher has also seen engine-revving on his team that's not as productive as it might appear.

One worker proposed goals centered on demonstrable output: Send 1,000 targeted messages to this demographic, sign up 100 people for a newsletter, and attend a certain number of conferences.

The worker's activity level was high, yet her commissions and results lagged, Goucher said.

"She felt like she was being very productive, but she wasn't seeing the outcome," he said.

Goucher redirected her to focus more on quantitative goals that would ultimately benefit the company, such as generating three new customers through an email campaign. The worker reported feeling more focused and aligned, Goucher said.

"It's really hard to get into the outcome mindset as opposed to the activity mindset," he said. "That's something we've had to work with our team on quite a bit."

Sending late-night emails

Workers' desires to show they're cranking on the job come as layoffs have become routine in some industries, including tech, where some companies hired many more workers during the pandemic.

That lingering fear can hurt morale and, while some workers might disengage, others could push harder, at least for a time. Layoff survivors who lock in can experience burnout and engage in presenteeism — the tendency to show up, log on, or overextend when they're sick or not operating at 100%.

In a climate where worries about layoffs and AI feel ever-present, visibility can become a survival strategy. As more companies settle into being in the office full time or part of the time, fully remote workers might especially feel pressure to show they're hustling.

Amanda Augustine, a career coach at TopResume, said that fears about layoffs and AI's reach aren't new, yet they've grown more intense among her clients in the last six months, she said.

"I hear it every single day — and at all levels," Augustine told Business Insider.

In 2025, US layoffs rose to the highest level since 2020, at the start of the pandemic. While headlines about cuts no longer tend to shock people, she said, they still take a toll.

"It's wearing people down," Augustine said. "Hence the job-hugging; hence the task-masking; the productivity theater."

Augustine said that the normalization of layoffs has left some workers feeling psychologically depleted and raised questions that hover over workdays: How secure is this company? How stable is my role?

Goucher, from Connext Global, said he's felt pressure over the years to demonstrate productivity, yet he's tried to remind himself to focus on results rather than just activity or the length of his workday.

"I was not one to leave my car in the parking lot," he said.

Do you have a story to share about productivity theater or pressure to perform at work? Contact this reporter at tparadis@businessinsider.com.