The Invisible Maintenance Work Nobody Counts
This is Learn Leadership. Every issue takes one thing that quietly goes wrong between managers and their teams, shows it happening through a real story, and leaves you with something to try this week.
Today it's the teammate whose numbers look thin while the whole team quietly leans on them. You'll leave with a two-week tally sheet that shows what their week actually holds, before you judge a single number.
Eleven tickets and a full week
Terry had Natasha's quarter open in one tab and the team average in the other. Natasha, the operations coordinator on his six-person team, had closed 11 tickets in September. Everyone else averaged 19.
He'd already typed the first line of her review. Then he tried something slower. He asked Natasha to spend two weeks logging every task that never became a ticket, in five-minute blocks, with nothing attached but the time it took.
The log came back at 9.5 hours a week. It covered software renewals, access requests, the onboarding checklist nobody else updated, and a Friday supplier call that had caught two late deliveries. None of it carried a ticket number, so the average never saw it.
The sociologist Arlene Kaplan Daniels named this in 1987. In her paper on invisible work, she argued that we count as work the things someone pays us to do, so the effort of keeping daily life and institutions running drops out of view. Natasha's log sorted into four kinds, and you've got all four on your team right now.
The Noticing
The first kind happens before any task exists. Natasha spotted that a client's renewal date had moved up a month. Thursday's new starter, she realized, still had no laptop on order. And the security certificate on the booking site was nine days from expiring, which she flagged on a Tuesday afternoon between two calls.
Her log held 14 catches like these across the two weeks. They took two or three minutes apiece, and any one of them, left alone, would have turned into somebody's frantic afternoon.
Noticing leaves nothing behind to count. Its product is the outage that never happened and the new starter who had a working laptop on day one. A dashboard can't show you that, so ask for it directly. In your next one-on-one, ask,
"What did you catch these last two weeks that nobody asked you to look for?"
Write the answers next to the closed tickets.
The Keeping
The second kind is holding the running state of the team in your head. Natasha knew which vendor contracts auto-renewed, who still had admin access after leaving a project, and where the current price sheet lived (the third folder down, in a file called "v7 use this one").
Keeping gets harder as the keeper gets better at it. Whoever knows where things live gets asked, and every answer keeps them the only one who knows. Natasha answered 31 "where's the..." messages in two weeks. Each took under a minute, and each one broke whatever she was doing.
Fix the keeping by writing it down once. Ask your version of Natasha to spend one hour building a single shared page with renewal dates, access lists, and the links people keep asking for. Then hand half of that page to someone else to own. You'll know it's working when the "where's the" messages start pointing at the page.
The Smoothing
The third kind is making other people's work go well. When Joel joined as a junior analyst during Natasha's first logging week, she spent three hours walking him through the supplier portal, the approvals chain, and which finance contact actually answers email.
Joel was productive by day four. His onboarding went into the quarterly report as a success, credited to the hiring plan. Natasha's three hours went nowhere, because there was nowhere for them to go.
Those three hours came out of her ticket time. Every hour she spent getting Joel up to speed was an hour she wasn't closing tickets, so the better she got someone else started, the worse her own numbers looked.
Smoothing also covers the quick question at someone's desk, the calm reply that stops a thread turning sour, and the explanation of how things really work here. Budget it like real work. When someone new joins, name their go-to person in writing and put two hours a week against that person's name for the first month. Once the time is planned, it shows up when you review the quarter.
The Covering
The fourth kind is the office housework that lands on whoever says yes: taking notes, booking rooms, organizing the leaving card, and chasing replies. Natasha had taken notes in six of the team's last eight meetings. Nobody had assigned it to her. She'd simply stopped waiting for the silence to end.
This work doesn't land at random. Linda Babcock and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh studied it in their research on low-promotability tasks, published in 2017. When a university emailed 3,271 faculty asking for committee volunteers, 7.0 percent of the women said yes, against 2.6 percent of the men.
Their lab experiments showed the other half. People asked women to volunteer more often, and women agreed 76 percent of the time when asked, against 51 percent for men. The same paper points to the fix: stop asking for volunteers. Put note-taking and room booking on a written rotation, so the job goes to a name and nobody has to wait out the pause.
What to do with all four
Terry deleted the first line of Natasha's review. Then he ran the same count across his whole team, because Natasha probably wasn't the only one carrying weight he couldn't see. Here's the version you can start on Monday:
- Share a tally sheet with four columns: noticing, keeping, smoothing, covering. Ask everyone to log any task over five minutes that has no ticket.
- Run it for two full weeks, since a single week catches too many odd days.
- Add up the hours by person and by column, and put them next to closed tickets.
- Move one covering task onto a rotation and one keeping task onto the shared page before your next review cycle.
Keep the tally out of performance ratings. Its job is to make sure the next review looks at the whole week. If people think the sheet will be used to grade them, they'll pad it, and you'll be back to measuring whatever's easiest to count.
Natasha's revised review opened with the 9.5 hours. Her ticket count stayed at 11, and this time nobody read it as the whole story.
