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What counts as invisible work?
Invisible work is not one kind of task. It can be administrative, emotional, physical, or social. In her study of work outside formal job definitions, Amit Kaplan grouped examples into four categories: invisible team work, physical care work, emotional labor, and administrative work. The point is not that every workplace relies on every category in the same way; it is that useful work can happen beyond the duties an organization formally assigns or records.
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- Team work: arranging a celebration or helping maintain the relationships and routines that let a team operate.
- Physical care work: tending to shared spaces, such as clearing a meeting room.
- Emotional labor: checking in on an anxious colleague or providing support that helps someone manage a difficult moment.
- Administrative work: preparing meeting notes or handling coordination that is necessary but absent from a person’s stated role.
These examples show why “invisible” does not mean unimportant. They may help people coordinate, feel supported, or use a shared space, while remaining absent from a ticket, job description, or formal accounting of work.
Why the ticket misses it
A ticket usually names a defined deliverable. But completing a deliverable can depend on less visible activity: someone has to coordinate, smooth over a snag, make a space usable, or keep other people informed. Ian Hampson and Anne Junor, researchers at the University of New South Wales, described this broader kind of effort as “the often unacknowledged management of awkward intersections among the social worlds of people, technology and organisations” in a 2005 article. They called it articulation work.
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Articulation work helps explain how a task can be real without appearing as a standalone assignment. A team may see the meeting notes or the finished project, but not the coordination that made the meeting useful or the project possible. The work can be routine enough to disappear into expectations: someone simply takes care of it.
Kaplan’s survey made that boundary explicit. Respondents were asked about things people sometimes do at work “even though it’s not part of their job definition,” and the study asked how often they did them during a normal work month. An interviewee in Kaplan’s article described organizational reliance on such practices with the phrase “the place will fall.” The speaker was a woman interviewee whose name was not reported.
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What the study found—and what its numbers mean
Kaplan’s 2022 peer-reviewed article in Gender & Society reports results from a 2018 Israeli labor-market sample of 964 participants. These figures describe that sample and its measures; they are not universal estimates of how often people do invisible work.
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|---|---|---|
| Invisible emotional labor | About one third reported doing it often or very often | Kaplan, 2022; data from a 2018 Israeli labor-market sample of 964 participants |
| Invisible physical-care work | Approximately 22 percent reported doing it often or very often | Kaplan, 2022; data from a 2018 Israeli labor-market sample of 964 participants |
| Invisible administrative work | Approximately 14 percent reported doing it often or very often | Kaplan, 2022; data from a 2018 Israeli labor-market sample of 964 participants |
| Invisible team work | 35 percent of women and 28 percent of men reported doing it at least occasionally | Kaplan, 2022; data from a 2018 Israeli labor-market sample of 964 participants |
The study reported gender differences for team work and emotional labor, but not for physical-care or administrative work. That finding is specific to the categories, measures, and Israeli sample used; it does not establish a universal pattern for all workplaces.
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What the evidence does not establish
The study measures how often respondents reported particular kinds of work outside their formal job definitions. Those results do not, by themselves, show that invisible work always affects promotion, pay, or productivity, or that every organization depends on these practices in the same way. Nor should workplace invisible work be treated as interchangeable with household unpaid labor: the settings overlap in questions of recognition and value, but they are distinct subjects with different evidence.
For a workplace, the practical distinction is between work that is simply unlisted and work that is also unrecognized or uncompensated. The examples make the first issue visible; whether a particular task is rewarded, shared fairly, or included in someone’s workload depends on the organization and cannot be inferred from the task alone.
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How to make the missing work discussable
The concept is most useful as a way to ask better questions about how work gets done, rather than as a label to apply automatically to every helpful act. A team can start by looking at the gap between formal assignments and recurring activity.
- Identify recurring tasks beyond formal roles. Note coordination, emotional support, shared-space care, and administrative tasks that happen repeatedly but do not appear in job definitions or trackers.
- Ask who is doing them and how often. Separate occasional help from a recurring expectation, and examine whether the same people repeatedly absorb it.
- Decide how the work should be handled. Depending on the task, a team may assign an owner, rotate responsibility, add it to workload planning, or recognize it in the role. Naming it makes those choices possible.
This is a practical implication, not a result Kaplan’s study tested. The underlying point is simpler: a task does not stop being work because it is missing from the ticket. Making it visible gives a team a chance to decide whether it should remain informal or become part of the work it plans and recognizes.
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Further reading
The Van Leer Institute describes Invisible Work in Israel, edited by Amit Kaplan and Maha Karkabi Sabah, as a 2017 Hebrew-language publication covering household duties, voluntary work, emotional work, and care work. Kaplan’s 2022 article focuses specifically on invisible practices in the labor market, so those broader settings should not be folded into its findings.
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