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Some of the work that keeps a team moving never appears in its ticket queue: writing meeting notes, calming a worried colleague, arranging a team event, or clearing a shared room. These tasks are real work even when they sit outside a formal job definition, and their value can be easy to miss precisely because someone quietly gets them done.
What counts as invisible work?
Invisible work is a useful name for necessary activity performed at work that falls outside a person’s formal job definition or goes unrecognized. It is not one job or one kind of task. Amit Kaplan’s 2022 study groups examples into four broad categories: invisible team work, physical care work, emotional labor, and administrative work.
- Team work: maintaining the social fabric of a group, such as arranging a celebration or helping a team stay connected.
- Physical care work: looking after shared spaces, for example by clearing a meeting room.
- Emotional labor: supporting colleagues or managing the emotional needs that arise at work, such as checking in on someone who is anxious.
- Administrative work: practical coordination and paperwork, such as preparing meeting notes when that is not part of the assigned role.
The boundaries depend on the job. Preparing notes is visible and assigned work for one employee, but invisible extra work for another who is expected to do it on top of unrelated responsibilities.
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Why a ticket queue misses it
Tickets and formal job descriptions are designed to make certain tasks legible: an owner, a deliverable, a status. But coordination, care, and small acts that help others continue their work often do not arrive as neat, separately assigned tasks. They may be handled in the gaps between formal responsibilities, without being recorded or recognized as work.
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Researchers Ian Hampson and Anne Junor used the term “articulation work” for “the often unacknowledged management of awkward intersections among the social worlds of people, technology and organisations” in a 2005 article. Their phrasing captures a common feature of work that slips past a tracker: someone has to make the people, tools, and processes fit together, even when that effort is not itself a tracked deliverable.
Invisible does not mean unimportant. Meeting notes can help a group share decisions; emotional support can help colleagues navigate a difficult moment; care for a shared space can make it usable. These examples illustrate how unrecorded work may support other work, though its role will vary by team and workplace.
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What the evidence says—and what it does not
Kaplan’s peer-reviewed 2022 article examined responses from a 2018 Israeli labor-market sample of 964 participants. The survey asked about tasks people did at work even though those tasks were outside their job definitions, and respondents reported how often they did them over a normal work month. In that specific sample and on those measures:
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1Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors2Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute3Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems- About one third said they performed invisible emotional labor often or very often.
- Approximately 22 percent said they performed invisible physical-care work often or very often.
- Approximately 14 percent said they performed invisible administrative work often or very often.
For invisible team work, 35 percent of women in the sample reported doing it at least occasionally, compared with 28 percent of men. Kaplan reported gender differences for team work and emotional labor, but not for physical-care or administrative work. Those findings describe the Israeli sample and the study’s categories; they should not be treated as universal rates or proof that gender determines who performs a task.
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The study measured task frequency and reported patterns by gender. It does not establish that invisible work universally affects promotion, pay, or productivity, nor does it show that every organization relies on each category in the same way.
How to make the work easier to see
A practical first step is to ask what recurring work makes the formal work possible, then record it without treating every helpful act as a permanent obligation. A team can use questions like these in a retrospective or workload review:
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- What recurring coordination, note-taking, onboarding, emotional support, or shared-space care happens outside assigned tasks?
- Who currently does it, how often, and roughly how much time does it take?
- Is the task part of someone’s role, recognized in workload planning, or simply assumed?
- Can it be rotated, assigned explicitly, resourced, or stopped?
Making the task visible does not automatically make its allocation fair. Recording only the output can also conceal who absorbs the interruption or emotional effort. A useful record names the work and its owner, while allowing the team to decide whether the task is necessary and how responsibility should be shared.
Keep workplace invisible work distinct from other unpaid work
Workplace invisible work overlaps in theme with unpaid household labor and voluntary work: each raises questions about recognition and value. They are not interchangeable settings, however. Kaplan’s 2022 study is specifically about practices in the labor market. The Van Leer Institute describes its 2017 Hebrew-language publication Invisible Work in Israel, edited by Amit Kaplan and Maha Karkabi Sabah, as covering household duties as well as voluntary, emotional, and care work. The workplace findings above should not be extended to those other contexts without evidence.
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