What If Work Stopped Rewarding Performance Theater?

Idonea

Sep 28

6 min read

For decades, we have confused looking busy with creating value. AI may finally force us to ask what work is actually for.

After more than 30 years in the workplace, many experienced professionals have developed a fairly reliable ability to recognize something almost immediately:

work that exists because it needs to be done — and work that exists because organizations have become accustomed to doing it.

The difference matters.

A recent Gen X video caught my attention because it described five workplace rituals many experienced workers are increasingly unwilling to pretend are useful: meetings before meetings, anxiety about appearing active online, compulsory team-building, the promise of the career ladder, and an endless culture of hustle.

It was funny because it was recognizable.

But underneath the humor is a serious question.

How much of modern work is actually work — and how much is performance?

The green dot is not evidence of contribution

Remote and hybrid work exposed an uncomfortable truth.

For years, many organizations used physical presence as a substitute for knowing whether someone was doing valuable work.

You were at your desk.

You arrived early.

You stayed late.

You attended the meetings.

Therefore, you must have been working.

When work moved online, we recreated the same system digitally.

Now the evidence might be a green status light.

An immediate response to a message.

A calendar full of meetings.

Constant activity in Teams or Slack.

But none of those things necessarily tells us whether meaningful work is happening.

A person can be visibly busy all day and accomplish very little.

Another person can spend three uninterrupted hours solving an important problem and appear almost completely inactive.

Yet our systems often find the first person easier to understand.

That should concern us.

Meetings can become evidence that work happened

Meetings are useful.

People need to collaborate, exchange information, resolve uncertainty, make decisions and develop ideas together.

But somewhere along the way, meetings can become a ritual in their own right.

We hold a meeting to prepare for another meeting.

We invite people who do not need to be there.

We sit through status updates that could have been communicated asynchronously.

And sometimes the existence of the meeting itself becomes proof that progress is being made.

But activity is not the same as progress.

A meeting should exist because human interaction will improve an outcome.

Not because the calendar needs to demonstrate that everyone is working.

Team-building cannot manufacture trust

The same applies to compulsory team-building.

Strong teams matter enormously.

People need psychological safety, mutual respect, communication, shared understanding and trust.

But none of those things can be manufactured through a mandatory afternoon activity if the everyday working environment undermines them.

Trust comes from how people are treated.

Whether someone can disagree safely.

Whether commitments are honored.

Whether credit is shared.

Whether people have the autonomy to do their jobs.

Whether managers listen.

Whether colleagues support one another when something goes wrong.

You cannot compensate for a dysfunctional work culture with a scheduled bonding exercise.

The career ladder was never as simple as we pretended

Another workplace ritual is the idea of the predictable career ladder.

Work hard.

Perform well.

Move upward.

Repeat.

For some people, that path has worked.

For many others, careers are much less orderly.

People stop working to care for children or parents.

They become ill.

They move countries.

Industries disappear.

Technology changes.

People retrain.

They freelance.

They start businesses.

They return to employment.

They discover that the career they built at 30 is not the career they want at 50.

And increasingly, careers may look less like ladders and more like networks.

People move sideways.

They combine disciplines.

They develop capabilities in one context and apply them somewhere completely different.

They leave and return.

They learn.

They change.

Yet many hiring and talent systems continue to expect linear progression.

When someone does not follow that sequence, the system often treats the deviation as a problem that needs explaining.

Perhaps the problem is the expectation.

Hustle is not a sustainable operating model

Then there is hustle.

The idea that commitment is demonstrated through constant availability, long hours and perpetual urgency.

For years, exhaustion has sometimes been worn almost as professional evidence:

I am overwhelmed, therefore I must be important.

I am always online, therefore I must be committed.

I have no time, therefore my work must matter.

But chronic overwork is not an indicator of organizational excellence.

Sometimes it is evidence that work has been badly designed.

A sustainable system should help people direct their energy toward the things that matter most.

It should not require them to continuously demonstrate their willingness to sacrifice themselves to prove that they belong.

This is bigger than Gen X

There is something particularly interesting about hearing these frustrations expressed by Gen X.

Many of us have spent decades inside organizations.

We remember work before email became ubiquitous.

Before smartphones.

Before Slack and Teams.

Before remote-work surveillance.

Before generative AI.

We've watched one layer of technology after another enter the workplace.

That creates perspective.

But this is not fundamentally a generational argument.

Younger workers can recognize pointless bureaucracy too.

So can neurodivergent workers.

Caregivers.

Disabled workers.

Remote workers.

Freelancers.

People returning after career breaks.

Anyone who has ever wondered why performing the rituals of work sometimes seems more important than producing the outcome.

The deeper problem is organizational design.

AI could make performance theater worse

AI now gives organizations the ability to produce more activity than ever before.

More emails.

More reports.

This is the same problem we see in hiring

The workplace has a proxy problem.

And hiring has one too.

Before someone enters an organization, we often assess them using:

résumés,

degrees,

job titles,

years of experience,

career continuity,

interview performance,

and increasingly, AI-generated assessments.

Once they are inside, we may assess them using:

hours,

attendance,

meeting participation,

online status,

responsiveness,

and visible activity.

Different systems.

Same mistake.

We substitute things that are easy to observe for things that actually matter.

A degree is easier to verify than capability.

A job title is easier to categorize than experience.

A green status light is easier to monitor than contribution.

A meeting is easier to count than insight.

But convenience does not make a proxy meaningful.

What if we designed work around outcomes instead?

At Adonea.ai, we have been asking a simple question:

What does the work actually require?

That question matters before hiring.

An employer should be able to define the responsibilities, deliverables, necessary capabilities, working conditions, constraints and intended outcomes of a role.

But perhaps the same principle should continue after someone joins the organization.

What are they responsible for?

What are they trying to accomplish?

What evidence tells us whether that work is succeeding?

Where is collaboration genuinely useful?

Where is autonomy more valuable?

What does the person need in order to perform well?

That is a very different conversation from:

Were you online at 8:30?

Why didn't you answer the message immediately?

Why weren't you in the optional meeting?

AI makes this conversation urgent

We are entering a period in which AI will change how many tasks are performed.

Some activities will become faster.

Some will disappear.

Some new ones will emerge.

That makes it increasingly difficult to justify organizational systems built around rituals inherited from another era.

If AI can summarize the meeting, perhaps fewer people need to attend it.

If AI can produce the routine report, perhaps the human contribution becomes judgment rather than formatting.

If AI can handle repetitive administration, perhaps we can give people more time for creativity, relationships, problem-solving and thoughtful decision-making.

But that will only happen if organizations are prepared to ask what human contribution is actually for.

Otherwise, we will automate the work and preserve the theater.

The future of work should be more human, not less

Rejecting pointless workplace rituals is sometimes described as disengagement.

I see another possibility.

Maybe people are becoming clearer about the difference between commitment and performance theater.

Wanting fewer unnecessary meetings does not mean someone dislikes collaboration.

Wanting flexibility does not mean someone lacks discipline.

Wanting boundaries does not mean someone is unambitious.

And refusing to pretend that exhaustion is a measure of professional worth is not quiet quitting.

It may simply mean we are finally asking better questions.

What work matters?

What outcomes matter?

What contribution matters?

And how do we create organizations that allow people to provide it?

The future of work should not require people to prove that they are busy.

It should make it possible for them to show what they contribute.

That is a much more interesting future to build.