‘Performative Work’: Workers in India & Japan Spend the Most Time ‘Looking Busy’ at Work
Every employee probably knows the difference between productive work and what a new report by the software company Slack calls performative work – merely looking but not actually being busy.
As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports, the data the report shows that workers in some Asian countries – namely India, Japan and Singapore – seem to spend more time appearing to be working than employees in other places.
While Indians spent 43 per cent of their time in performative work, that number was 37 and 36 per cent in Japan and Singapore, respectively.
For comparison, U.S. respondents and those from Germany said they only appeared busy 28 and 29 per cent of the time.
One outlier in Asia was South Korea, also with a low of 28 per cent of work hours spent in “pretend mode”. South Korea and Japan – for which OECD data exist – can be found at opposing ends of the productivity spectrum.
South Korean productivity (measured in GDP per hour worked) increased by more than 28 per cent, one of the best results among countries surveyed. Japan’s productivity gains meanwhile were much lower, increasing only by 8.7 per cent in ten years.
However, the United States scored a similar result despite having a low relative share of performative work. This shows that several more factors, for example, how mature an economy is, influence productivity increases.
