Why Busyness Is the Most Expensive Habit in Your Company

By Victor Hoang · Updated Oct 10, 2026

Ask a leader whether their company rewards busyness and you'll get a quick no. Ask who got praised in the last all-hands, who gets the "always on" reputation, and whose calendar is the fullest, and the answer changes. Most organizations don't decide to reward busyness. They drift into it, because activity is visible and output usually isn't.

Our view is that busyness is a cultural cost center, and probably the most expensive one most companies run. It doesn't show up on a budget line. It shows up as meetings that exist to prove people are working, replies sent at 10 p.m. to prove commitment, and good people burned out on tasks nobody could connect to a result. The fix isn't a productivity app. It's defining what output means for each role and refusing to praise effort that has no result attached.

Key Facts

• In a 2022 Microsoft Work Trend Index pulse report, 87% of employees said they were productive, while 85% of leaders said hybrid work made it hard to be confident their people were. Microsoft calls that gap "productivity paranoia."
• Research in the Journal of Consumer Research found that Americans increasingly see busy, overworked people as higher status, while Italian participants still associated a leisurely life with high status.
• Stanford economist John Pencavel's analysis of WWI-era munitions workers found that output at 70 hours a week differed little from output at 56 hours, and that output only rose at a decreasing rate once weekly hours passed 49.
• Microsoft's 2023 Work Trend Index found that 68% of workers said they don't have enough uninterrupted focus time, and that the average employee spends 57% of their time communicating and 43% creating.
• Gallup reports that only 47% of employees strongly agree they know what is expected of them at work, down from 56% just before the pandemic and 61% in 2015.

Why Organizations Reward What They Can See

The mechanism is simple. A manager has to evaluate people, and output is hard to observe. A strategy memo, a resolved customer escalation, and a cleaner handoff all take judgment to assess. A full calendar, a fast Slack reply, and a late-night email take none. So managers lean on the signals they can see, and employees learn quickly which signals count.

There's a social layer on top. The Journal of Consumer Research study by Silvia Bellezza, Neeru Paharia, and Anat Keinan, covered by ScienceDaily, ran a series of studies mostly with participants from Italy and the US. Among Americans, being busy at work was linked to higher perceived standing. In Italy the pattern ran the other way. That tells you busyness isn't a law of nature. It's a culture, and cultures can be changed on purpose.

Then there's the manager's own incentive. Research by Kimberly Elsbach and colleagues, summarized in MIT Sloan Management Review, describes "passive face time," meaning simply being seen at work, and reports that people with less of it may get lower performance evaluations, smaller raises, and fewer promotions even when they work equally hard. If the system pays for being seen, rational people get seen.

None of this requires bad intent. It requires only that output is harder to read than activity, and that nobody has fixed that.

What Busyness Actually Costs

The bill arrives in four places.

Wasted hours that look like work. The Microsoft figures above are telling. If 57% of the average employee's time goes to communicating and 68% say they lack focus time, a large share of the working day is spent on activity that coordinates work rather than doing it. Our piece on the real cost of coordination goes deeper on how that overhead compounds as teams grow.

Diminishing returns on effort. Pencavel's analysis of munitions workers is old, and it's a factory setting, so treat it as a pattern rather than a prediction for your marketing team. But the shape is consistent: past a threshold, extra hours buy very little. A culture that praises the 70-hour week is paying for hours that, in that data, added almost nothing over 56.

Burnout and attrition. When effort is the currency, people spend it until it runs out. Microsoft's WorkLab write-up notes that nearly half of employees say they're burned out, which is the predictable result of rewarding stamina over results. We covered the exit side of this in why your best people leave meeting-heavy teams.

Surveillance spending. Microsoft's WorkLab piece describes productivity paranoia as leaders fearing employees aren't working enough even when the signs suggest people are overworked to the point of exhaustion. The temptation is to respond with more tracking of activity, which only feeds the habit. The data you collect is only as useful as the question behind it.

The Busyness Test: Activity or Output?

Before changing anything, find out what your organization actually pays for. Look at a sample of recent praise, promotions, and performance conversations and sort each reason into the table below.

If most of your examples land in the left two columns, you have a busyness culture. That isn't a verdict on any person. It's a description of what the system rewards.

Define Output Per Role

The central move is to write down, for every role, what a good week produces. Not a job description, which lists responsibilities, but an output statement: the observable results this role exists to create.

Gallup's finding that only 47% of employees strongly agree they know what's expected of them is the root of the problem. If the employee can't say what output looks like, the manager can't judge it, and both fall back on activity as a stand-in.

A workable output definition has three parts: a result, a measure, and a time frame. The table shows how it changes by role.

Notice that the right column contains no hours, no message counts, and no meeting totals. It also contains no pure volume metric, because volume without quality is just a faster way to be busy. Pair every quantity with a quality check. If you want help turning role outputs into goals, our library article on setting goals and metrics walks through how goals connect to day-to-day measures, and process KPIs covers how to choose measures that tell you whether the work is actually working.

Refuse to Praise Effort Without Results

Definitions don't change culture on their own. Praise does, because praise is the clearest message leaders send about what matters.

Praise the outcome and the judgment behind it. "Maya's decision to cut the weekly report saved the team six hours and nobody missed it" teaches something. "Maya is always on top of everything" teaches people to look on top of everything.

That doesn't mean ignoring effort. Real effort in service of a real result deserves recognition. The discipline is attaching the result to the sentence. When you notice yourself praising a late night or a fast reply, finish the thought: what did it produce? If you can't answer, you've found the busyness.

Three habits make this stick:

1. Change the opening question in reviews. Start with "what did you produce?" before "how was your workload?"
2. Stop rewarding responsiveness by default. Pair a clear norm on response times with a clear norm on what is truly urgent. Our article on paying for responsiveness instead of results covers how that incentive creeps into compensation and promotion.
3. Model it from the top. If the CEO sends messages at midnight and replies within minutes, the stated policy is irrelevant. People copy what the most senior person does.

Fix the Structures That Manufacture Busyness

Some busyness is a symptom of structure rather than culture. Three structural fixes pay back quickly.

Make decisions faster and clearer. Unclear ownership produces meetings, and meetings produce the appearance of progress. Our analysis of decision-making velocity shows how decision rights shape speed.

Protect focus time. Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index special report found that the most-pinged fifth of its users received roughly 275 pings a day from meetings, emails, and chats. That's the top end, not the average, but it shows what an interrupt-driven environment can look like. For the structural case, see deep work as a business strategy.

Default to written updates. Status meetings are a classic busyness machine, since attendance signals engagement whether or not anything is decided. Moving routine updates into writing frees the hours and makes output visible in a form people can scan. The distinction between async-first and remote-first, covered in this piece on async-first operating models, is a good place to start.

What to Do Next

You don't need a company-wide program to start. Here's a sequence a COO or functional leader can run in about six weeks.

1. Week 1: Run the busyness test. Collect the last quarter's recognition posts, promotion rationales, and review summaries. Sort them using the table above. Share the result with your leadership team without blame.
2. Weeks 2 and 3: Write output statements. For each role on your team, draft a result, a measure, and a time frame. Review them with the people in those roles, because they will spot what you've missed.
3. Week 4: Audit one recurring ritual. Pick the meeting, report, or channel that exists mostly to demonstrate activity. Convert it to a written update or cancel it for a month.
4. Week 5: Change how you praise. Commit your leadership team to attaching a result to every public recognition. Track how often you do it.
5. Week 6: Review what moved. Look at decision times, deliverables shipped, and how people describe their own week. If they can name their outputs, the definitions are working.

Then repeat the cycle. Output definitions drift as roles change, and busyness grows back wherever you stop watching for it.

The Point

Busyness is expensive because it's invisible on every report you read and visible in every meeting you attend. It persists because it's easy to see and easy to reward. The remedy is unglamorous: say what each role produces, measure that, and praise accordingly. Do it consistently and most of the performative activity has nothing left to feed on.