Archives for June 1, 2025

This is the three-step process that lets you get the best out of your team and allow them to thrive in a sustainable way.

In my twenties, I was the kind of employee managers loved and therapists worried about. I worked late without being asked. I answered emails during vacation and treated 11 p.m. messages like asteroid-headed-for-Earth emergencies. My identity was stitched to my output, and I wore burnout like a badge of honor. Somewhere along the way, many of us signed this invisible contract stating that success demands sacrifice. For us, time, health, and relationships were all fair game in the pursuit of professional validation. But now, more people are realizing it’s a contract they want to break: According to Gallup’s most recent global report , employee engagement is down two percentage points to just 21%, and manager engagement saw an even more dramatic drop. An alternative to quiet quitting For me, becoming a parent made me realize that “powering through” was not just hard, but unsustainable. My time was no longer mine to give away so freely. I started making small changes like declining late meetings, muting notifications after 6 p.m., and blocking Friday afternoons for deep work so I could log off fully over the weekend. Each change felt like a micro-rebellion against my internalized idea of what defines a great professional. Many employees today just make these shifts subtly—somewhere between 20% and 40% of the workforce are quiet quitters , according to data from McKinsey and the Understanding Society —and part of me was tempted to just pull back quietly, too. Instead, I decided to swing the other way. I got louder about what I needed. I told colleagues when I was logging off, and then actually logged off. I pushed back on two-day timelines and offered alternatives that protected both the quality of my work and my sanity. Most importantly, I stopped padding my newly found boundaries with apologies. This approach—what I’ve come to call loud living—isn’t about doing less. It’s about showing up better, with focus and clarity. It isn’t about less ambition, but ambition that doesn’t cost you everything else. Here’s how anyone can move from burnout-fueled achievement to sustainable success, without even having to be quiet about it. 1. Redefine Success for Yourself First Traditional success metrics like promotions, title bumps, and glowing performance reviews are easy to chase because they’re visible and externally validating. But I realized that those wins don’t mean a lot if they come with a side of chronic exhaustion and missing important things in my personal life. I started redefining success on my own terms: Did I get the important work done and make it to storytime? Did I show up fully without sacrificing my health, sleep, or relationships? Measuring success this way didn’t make me less ambitious—it made me more intentional. And it gave me a reason to protect my time as fiercely as I used to chase someone else’s version of achievement. 2. Tag Your Calendar Transparently I used to write “busy” as a default time block, thinking it made me look like I wasn’t slacking, but having things other than my job responsibilities on my calendar. But “busy” doesn’t communicate priorities. Swapping it for things like “deep work,” “school pickup,” or “thinking time” not only made my day more manageable, but gave colleagues insight into how I work best. It signaled that all time—not just meetings—is valuable, and that caregiving or creative work deserve just as much space as Zoom calls. Transparency in your calendar builds trust. And when people see you respecting your own time, they’re more likely to respect it, too. 3. Clearly Communicate Personal Nonnegotiables It still feels moderately uncomfortable telling my team, “I’m not available before 9 a.m. because that’s school drop-off.” I expected eye rolls or assumptions that I was less committed. Naming nonnegotiables doesn’t mean you’re rigid. It means you’re clear on what keeps you grounded, and you’re modeling a healthier way to mesh life and work without hiding behind vague time blocks and secret stress. 4. Put Up Your OOO Message, Even If You’re Not on Vacation Out of office replies used to feel like something reserved for work travel and time off. But I think we can all agree that life doesn’t wait for vacation. When I started using OOO messages for moments like caring for a sick kid and going offline to reset, I noticed something powerful: people responded with understanding, not judgment. By expanding what’s worthy of an OOO message, we start the process to normalize that time away is not always tied to beaches and life milestones like weddings. Sometimes it’s about boundaries, bandwidth, and being human. 5. Ask Your Team (and Yourself) the Tough Questions Work–life alignment starts with curiosity, not just policies. What does someone really need to feel present at work and at home? What’s the thing they never want to miss, or the time of day when they’re truly in flow? These aren’t just nice-to-know details, but critical inputs to help teams collaborate effectively and do their best work. By asking these questions not just as a manager, but as a teammate, and answering them for ourselves, we start treating each person as a whole human, not just a job title. This kind of clarity reduces burnout, builds empathy, and makes it easier to plan work that honors priorities and the people. Normalize having honest conversations around personal priorities and boundaries. Managers and teammates alike can ask: What are your personal nonnegotiables? What time of day do you work best? What’s one thing you want to protect weekly? What do you never want to miss? 6. Practice Saying No Without Apologizing If you were raised in hustle culture, saying “no” can feel like a big ol’ failure or make you seem weak. For years, I padded every boundary with “I’m so sorry,” followed by justifications. But over time, I realized that being clear about my limits wasn’t disrespectful. It was actually responsible, both for myself and my team. Saying, “I can’t take this on right now, but here’s when I can revisit based on what’s on my plate,” is honest and professional. The Boundary-Filled Future of Work Work–life balance may not be a universal reality. But work–life alignment—a career that adapts to your life, not erases it—is worth building toward. Is this realistic for everyone? Not always. Some roles require reactivity, and others rely on client schedules, shift work, or global time zones. But even in those cases, we can normalize transparency over perfection. Being clear about bandwidth, boundaries, and priorities helps teams operate more effectively and with more empathy. And we could all use a bit more empathy—parents and non-parents alike. We need to start treating boundaries as a performance tool, not a privilege.

There’s nothing spooky about ghostworking, apart from how popular it may be right now. The newly coined term describes a set of behaviors meant to create a facade of productivity at the office, like walking around carrying a notebook as a prop or typing random words just to generate the sound of a clacking keyboard. (Some might call this Costanza-ing , after Jason Alexander’s example on a memorable episode of Seinfeld .) Pretending to be busy at the office is not something workers recently invented, of course, but it appears to be reaching critical mass. According to a new survey , more than half of all U.S. employees now admit to regularly ghostworking. That statistic doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that the American workforce is mired in permanent purgatory. Conducted by top resume-building service Resume Now, the report is based on a survey of 1,127 U.S. workers this past February. The results show that 58% of employees admit to regularly pretending to work, while another 34% claim they merely do so from time to time. What might be most striking about the report’s findings, though, are some of the elaborate methods workers use to perform productivity. Apparently, 15% of U.S. employees have faked a phone call for a supervisor’s benefit, while 12% have scheduled fake meetings to pad out their calendars, and 22% have used their computer keyboards as pianos to make the music of office ambiance. As for what these employees are actually doing while pretending to crush deliverables, in many cases it’s hunting for other jobs. The survey shows that 92% of employees have job searched in some way while on the clock, with 55% admitting they do so regularly. In fact, some of those fake calls employees have made while walking around the office may have been on the way to making real calls to recruiters, since 20% of those surveyed have taken such calls at work. While ghostworking may overlap in some ways with the quiet quitting trend that emerged in 2023, there’s a clear distinction between them. It hinges on the definition of the word “perform.” “Someone who is quiet quitting has essentially checked out of their job mentally and is performing the bare minimum of work necessary,” says Keith Spencer, a career expert at Resume Now. “They are flying under the radar and operating in a way that avoids any attention. Ghostworking, on the other hand, is a performance. It involves actively projecting an appearance of busyness without actually engaging in meaningful work.” If quiet quitting was a response to pandemic-era burnout and an abrupt surge in return-to-office mandates, ghostworking appears to be a response to, well, everything that has happened since. Even before the newly created DOGE began decimating some government and contractor offices around the country in late January, the waves of layoffs starting in 2023 have continued to gain momentum in the tech world and beyond . Unemployment is still fairly low at 4.2%, not counting those workers who are “functionally unemployed,” but workers everywhere are worried about a recession. Meanwhile, the drive to incorporate AI into workflow at most companies has created a palpable sense of uncertainty around exactly how to perform jobs in the present, and whether those jobs will even exist in the future. It’s no wonder a recent LinkedIn Workforce Confidence Survey found that U.S. workers’ faith in their job security and ability to find new work has plummeted to its lowest level since April 2020, during the onset of the pandemic. Adding to this decline in morale and engagement is a recent decrease in clarity of expectations. According to a Gallup poll from January , just 46% of employees clearly know what’s expected of them at work these days, down 10 points from a high of 56% in March 2020. Many workers now live with the tacit understanding that they will have to work harder than ever to avoid getting caught in an impending cull, but without quite being aligned with management on what that work entails. It’s in this kind of office environment that ghostworking seems to thrive. “The workforce is currently under immense pressure to appear productive, even when it’s counterintuitive to actual productivity,” Spencer says. “These behaviors point to a deeper disconnect between how productivity is perceived and how it’s actually delivered. In many cases, the appearance of working has become just as important as the work itself.” The Resume Now survey indicates that 69% of employees believe they’d be more productive if their manager monitored their screen time. However, this invasive approach to task visibility seems destined to backfire. A 2023 report from analytics firm Visier found that employees faced with surveillance tools were “more than twice (and in some cases three times) as likely to commit the most egregious performative behaviors, like keeping a laptop screen awake while not working, asking someone to do a task for them, and exaggerating when giving a status update.” Even if surveillance did prove effective against ghostworking, it would be an attack on its symptoms, rather than the root causes. The ongoing return-to-office resurgence has left many employees feeling like they’re working inside of a fishbowl, right as other external factors have made their jobs more challenging and less stable. Some data shows that workers are just as productive while working from home as at the office, while other studies find workers are even more productive at home. Still, for some leaders, a full office humming with deskside chats that could possibly be brainstorming sessions is the only productivity metric that matters. Employees sensing a greater need to broadcast that they’re getting work done than to actually do the work at hand suggests managers may be rewarding performative work. Whatever the solution to the ghostworking trend might be for any individual company, it will likely have to come from those managers shifting their thinking. As Spencer notes, “when managers offer more trust, flexibility, and space to do meaningful work—instead of focusing on constant visibility—teams are more likely to stay engaged and actually deliver.”