“Disappearing” Work: How the Corporate Quest for Balance Drives Invisible Labor
Companies preach work-life balance but still demand overwork—only now, workers must hide it. This invisible labor sustains businesses while reinforcing inequality.
“My team has worked really hard to… they would call it ‘socialize’ work-life balance,” Cammie told me, reflecting on her tech firm’s evolving culture. Like many companies riding the post-pandemic wellness wave, they plastered the walls with self-care reminders and mandated “offline hours,” and she genuinely loved working there. Despite the company’s recent push for work-life balance, just a year before our meetup, Cammie had literally worked herself sick after putting in forty-eight straight hours. Something wasn’t adding up.
The new rhetoric around balance was everywhere, yet paradoxically, no one wanted to admit they were still working long hours. “They always talk to me in really hushed tones,” Cammie said, lowering her voice to mimic her coworkers. “Like, they literally look around to the side to make sure no one is around before saying, ‘I stayed up to 2AM working on this.’”
Cammie’s coworkers aren’t alone. In interviews with over fifty professionals across tech, finance, media, and management consulting, I encountered many similar stories. As burnout becomes a corporate concern, many employers are shifting the conversation from hours worked to results delivered. On paper, the focus on outcomes versus monitoring workers’ time looks like progress. In practice, however, it turns overwork into a personal failure rather than an organizational problem.
The upshot isn’t just workers continuing to put in long hours. What’s notable is how they feel compelled to hide them from their managers. They keep their late nights and early mornings quiet, afraid that being seen working too much will make them look inefficient or unbalanced. Their silence poignantly masks the individual struggle to keep up in today’s economy. And when taken up in mass, the practice conceals chronic understaffing that normalizes unsustainable workloads, enabling exploitative work practices to continue unchecked.
From Face Time to Results Only
Not long ago, overtime hours were worn like a badge of honor, especially in elite professions like those I studied, where “face time” cultures equated visibility with work ethic and commitment. Loud echoes of this mentality remain in today’s offices – most clearly in managerial insistence on remote workers returning to the office.
But headwinds exist in the form of a lack of wholesale buy-in from Millennial and Gen Z workers and growing murmurs that employee burnout undermines company performance. In the shifting tides, entrenched and emerging managerial ethos collide. “I think shitty managers just keep pushing and pushing,” Sam, a millennial working in investment banking, told me, “and that’s ultimately how you break people. That’s how you create a sense of discontent, and how you either lose folks or folks just stop working as hard.”
Acknowledging the waning hold of “old-school” managerial mentalities, many workplaces have transitioned toward “results-only” cultures that evaluate workers not on their hours but their output. Alice, a manager at a digital media company, personified this new results-oriented mindset. “I actually had someone underneath me who thought that [working long hours would get her promoted] for a long time,” she scoffed. “I kept trying to tell her, ‘That’s not how it works. I don't want you to be overworked because your mind is not clear for the next day.’” Alice went on to describe the shift in organizational philosophy. “It’s not about working more,” she explained. “It’s about being smarter about how you work.”
The Fallacy of Working Smarter
Working smarter is, indeed, the mantra of results-only work environments. For managers like Alice, working “smarter” means being more efficient in getting things done, without a substantial trade-off in effectiveness. And workers who achieve this are rewarded with greater autonomy. “As long as I’m getting my work done and making the right contributions, nobody’s watching me and micromanaging me,” Cammie’s colleague Rae explained. “I really appreciate [that]. I think that makes a nice flexible environment.”
Another colleague, Aki, described the “ideal worker” within this model as people who “have the ability to be extremely productive and efficient with their time.” She marveled at company leaders who, in her words, were “efficiency beasts,” highlighting their novel time optimization strategies like ‘walking meetings’ that double as exercise while making use of time otherwise spent moving between offices. Aki said she and her colleagues often tried to emulate these leaders. “When I’m at work, usually I’m just on,” she explained, though she admitted this approach often meant “sacrificing things like eating lunch or taking bio breaks or getting some fresh air – um, having a little sanity time.”
Working smarter is a rational goal for businesses, which ostensibly operate on a market logic that prioritizes efficiency and productivity. But this work optimization strategy has significant drawbacks beyond not allowing workers to gather at the watercooler or share a cup of coffee. It doesn’t allow for time-intensive processes like relationship-management, creative incubation, and ethical debate – activities that are only loosely coupled to measurable outputs or quarterly earnings. Nevertheless, these intangibles matter. These seemingly inefficient activities create the conditions for organizational resilience and sustainable competitive advantage in rapidly changing markets. When organizations invest in these elements, they cultivate exactly what modern businesses need most – the capacity for talent development, strategic innovation, and thoughtful execution – the kind of deep, high-quality work that prioritizes rigor, discernment, and craft over speed.
An Economy Run on Ghost Work
What happens to these intangibles when we work smarter? In some organizations, they simply fall by the wayside, leaving lean workplaces lurching from one short-term crisis to the next, surviving – and eventually perishing – on the burn-and-churn of disposable labor. In others, like the tech firm where Cammie, Rae, and Aki worked, people continue to do this work “off-the-clock.” “I always monitor emails,” Josh told me, “up until I actually close my eyes and fall asleep. Even when I wake up to go to the bathroom, I check my emails.” His dedication helped ensure seamless collaboration across time zones, but he was careful not to make his efforts too visible. “I only reply to the urgent ones,” he told me, noting how it’s “not a good look” to be seen as working around the clock.
Workers like Josh quietly labor in the shadows and along the margins, ensuring their companies flourish – not for individual gain but out of a sense of passion and obligation. As Aki explained, “you start feeling kind of guilty [if you don’t work hard] because this job makes you care about the company as though it’s a human.”
As Lilly Irani has powerfully argued, human labor – especially that of the rank and file – is framed in corporate America as capital drain and thus anathema to business profitability. Researchers have traced this dynamic within work automation trends, showing how owners hide (and minimize) labor costs by outsourcing technology edge cases and failures to a “ghost work” labor force. While these ghost workers are essential to automation’s success, they receive neither the glory nor the pay or even the basic workplace protections they deserve.
My research suggests a corollary process is happening within professional office spaces. Just as companies rely on hidden ‘ghost workers’ to handle automation's limitations, they also increasingly depend on the invisible extra labor of their professional workforce. Caught between continuous resource cuts and managerial demands to ‘work smarter,’ professionals quietly absorb critical but unrecognized tasks: monitoring emails around the clock to smooth global communications, coaching overwhelmed colleagues, and staying up late to make sense of shifting priorities. This labor is essential, ensuring companies align stakeholders, retain talent, and avoid costly missteps. Yet, to be seen laboring on such tasks risks looking undisciplined and unable to keep up. And so it is “disappeared,” hidden within an ever-shrinking stable workforce, creating yet another form of ghost work – the unseen and undervalued labor that keeps the modern economy running.
This economy, built on hidden labor, forces workers into an impossible bind: they must go beyond human limits while making it look effortless. In this context, the hushed conversations about late nights and weekend work are more than individual choices – they’re symptoms of a system that has learned to camouflage exploitation as personal ambition. By making overwork invisible, this model sustains lean organizations while upholding the illusion of meritocracy, making it seem as though those who rise to the top do so purely on talent rather than on their ability to privately absorb unpaid labor. Those who can’t afford to work endless (unpaid) overtime – due to caregiving responsibilities, financial constraints, or lack of insider advantages – are framed as less competent or less committed. And because this performance of effortlessness is mistaken for genuine ability, the system continues to reward those with the resources to sustain it, widening gaps in opportunity and access. This isn’t just a quirk of elite professions—it ripples outward, entrenching a system where ‘keeping up’ is less about merit and more about the privilege of having enough cushion to perform effortlessness and ease.
Until organizations align their rhetoric with realistic resourcing and truly value labor, professional workers will continue living double lives – publicly thriving while privately burning out – as they work to keep businesses from unraveling under the weight of their own efficiency mandates. The path forward requires not just new workplace policies but a fundamental reassessment of how we value labor, measure success, and reckon with the human cost of corporate achievement.