Some employees are guilty of coffee badging, or even jiggling their mouses to look active while working remotely. But even when they’re being productive on the job, there are a few tasks that could be considered “fake” work—at least according to Slack cofounder and former CEO Stewart Butterfield.
“Here’s my grand theory: Hyper-realistic worklike activities goes along with this other concept called known valuable work to do,” Butterfield recently said on Lenny’s Podcast. “Hyper-realistic worklike activity is superficially identical to work…But this is actually a fake bit of work, and it’s so subtle.”
Butterfield coined these two concepts, having seen the type of work that goes into scaling startups into big businesses. The serial entrepreneur cofounded photo-sharing platform Flickr in 2002, serving as its CEO for several years, before his next venture establishing and leading $26.5 billion giant Slack back in 2009. Butterfield has been keeping a low profile since he stepped down from the company in January 2023.
From his decades of experience in the business world, he’s separated workforce productivity into two separate camps: hyper-realistic worklike activities, which he deems as “fake” work, and known valuable work, which promotes innovation and strengthens success.
How “fake” work appears as startups scale into big businesses
As a two-time startup founder, Butterfield witnessed that the problem with “fake” work often stems from the early years of business. At the start, employees are just trying to get the company off the ground: opening a bank account, creating a users table, salting passwords, and doing all the nuts-and-bolts type of work that is “absolutely” necessary to the brand’s foundation. Those early tasks create “almost infinite generative value,” according to Butterfield, since they’re required to get a business up and running. But once a company grows, that value creation changes.
“The problem with almost every organization [is] at the very beginning, you have an enormous amount of work that you know what to do, and you know that it’s going to be valuable,” Butterfield explained.“Everyone’s going to work in the morning like, ‘I have 10 things to do and every single one of them is like something I know how to do, and it’s definitely going to be valuable.’”
“Time goes on, and the relationship between the supply of work to do and the demand for doing work just starts to change.”
The former Slack CEO explained that over time, more and more people get hired. Eventually, those employees want more junior-level talent to help support their teams, and suddenly, businesses have many staffers ready to work, with all “easy, obvious stuff” having been done already.
But if an employer has many workers who do not have enough clear, high-value job expectations, then staffers may spend their time doing those hyper-realistic worklike activities. Butterfield clarified that it’s not because employees are “stupid” or “evil,” but only because they want to be recognized for the duties they perform. And if bosses aren’t being transparent about known valuable work to do, then staffers will try to excel within the status quo of their teams.
Workers and CEOs don’t even know they’re doing “fake” work
Hyper-realistic worklike activities aren’t always blatantly unproductive. In fact, Butterfield said that “fake” work often comes across as typical job tasks.
“People are calling meetings with their colleagues to preview the deck that they’re going to show in the big meeting, to get feedback on whether they should improve some of the slides,” Butterfield explained. “We are sitting in a conference room, and there’s something being projected up there, and we’re all talking about it, and that’s exactly what work is.”
The Slack cofounder noted that this type of “fake” work is very subtle to pick up on—and even the most senior leadership will fall victim to the habit.
“I’ll do it, our board members will do it, every exec will do it,” Butterfield admitted. “The further you are from having all of the contacts, and all the information, and the decision-making authority, the easier it is to get trapped in that stuff, and people will just perform enormous amounts of hyper-realistic worklike activities, and have no idea that that’s what they’re doing.”
However, the onus for ensuring that all workers are doing known valuable work—from the entry-level, all the way up to senior executives—falls on top bosses, according to Butterfield. CEOs, managers, directors, and executives need to be transparent about their expectations and how to meaningfully drive the business forward. Butterfield advised that these leaders create clarity around known valuable work, so everyone understands that’s what they’re supposed to be doing.
“It’s actually your responsibility to make sure that there’s sufficient clarity around what the priorities are, and explicitly saying ‘no’ to things upfront, rather than words like, ‘Hey you guys are a bunch of idiots wasting your time on this thing that doesn’t matter,’” Butterfield said.