A recent survey found that 65% of employees regularly engage in “productivity theater” – performing tasks designed to appear busy without producing meaningful work. At the same time, McKinsey found that 75% of organizations are failing to build high-performance cultures. These two data points are far more connected than they look.
A few months ago, a client of mine described a weekly ritual at his company that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. Every Monday morning, his team submits a “wins report” documenting what they accomplished the previous week. These reports are reviewed by a senior leader who rarely reads past the first three lines. Most of the team, my client told me, now spends between 30 and 45 minutes each week crafting these reports to sound more impressive than the actual work warrants, padding deliverables with adjectives and framing minor tasks as strategic accomplishments. No one has ever been recognized for an insight in these reports, but several people have been flagged for not submitting one.
That is performance theater in its most familiar form: effort spent performing the appearance of value rather than creating it, in an environment where the appearance has become more reliably rewarded than the substance.
Forbes published a piece this month by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a professor of business psychology at University College London and Columbia, that gave this phenomenon the framing it has needed for a while. He cited survey data showing that 65% of employees admit to regular productivity theater, and pointed out that the real number is almost certainly higher, because most people don’t recognize it in themselves.
The observation that stuck with me most was his description of the patterns hiding in plain sight across most organizations: the manager who is perpetually in meetings that produce no decisions, the employee toggling between tabs with practiced urgency, and the executive whose calendar is completely full but whose actual contributions are hard for anyone to trace. He argued that if AI is enabling people to do more in less time, then performance standards should evolve to reflect that. In most organizations, though, the standards haven’t moved at all, and the vacuum is being filled by theater.
McKinsey’s State of Organizations 2026 report, which surveyed 10,000 senior executives across 15 countries, found that 75% of organizations are failing to build the high-performance cultures they claim to want. The single biggest barrier, cited by 47% of executives, was limited career progression. Another 43% pointed to a lack of targeted incentives, and 38% said their employees are simply disengaged.
When you lay those two findings next to each other, the picture becomes uncomfortably clear. Organizations are demanding more output while failing to create the conditions that produce it, and employees, sensing that real performance doesn’t reliably lead to recognition or advancement, are defaulting to the next best survival strategy: looking productive enough to stay safe.
Why This Should Concern You Even If You’re Not Doing It
If you’re someone who does meaningful work, avoids the theater, and assumes your results speak for themselves, you might think this doesn’t apply to you. But the problem with performance theater is that it distorts the environment for everyone around it.
When visibility becomes the proxy for value, the people who are heads-down solving real problems become invisible, and the people who narrate their contributions the loudest end up occupying the space where decisions about promotions, special projects, and leadership opportunities get made.
This is in line with something I’ve written about at length. In my article “The Real Reason You’re Not Getting Promoted”, I walked through how many high-performing professionals operate under the assumption that excellent work will eventually surface and be rewarded. In most organizations, it won’t.
Promotion decisions happen in conversations where your name either comes up with energy or doesn’t come up at all. If you aren’t deliberately shaping how your work gets discussed in those moments, someone else’s version of productivity theater is filling the space your results should be occupying.
The McKinsey report reinforced something that career coaches and recruiters have been saying for years, but now there’s research at scale behind it: people don’t leave for pay. They leave when they stop moving. When progression stalls and the incentive system rewards company optics over real outcomes, the most capable people start to disengage, and eventually they leave. The ones who stay tend to adapt to the culture they’re in, and that often means learning the theater, even if they started out resisting it.
The AI Layer Makes This Worse, Not Better
There’s a second, related trend that deserves attention. Staffing Industry Analysts reported last year that 16% of workers admitted to pretending to use AI at work to meet employer expectations, and 22% said they feel pressured to use AI in situations they’re unsure about. The term gaining traction is “AI theater”: performing the appearance of AI fluency the same way employees have always performed the appearance of busyness, because the organization has made it clear that adoption is expected without making the purpose or the payoff clear.
This is the same dynamic – just wearing different clothes. When companies signal that they want AI integration but don’t invest in training, clear use cases, or honest conversations about what the tools can and can’t do, employees fill the gap the only way they know how: by performing. And the people who are most likely to get caught in that performance loop are the same mid-career professionals who were already navigating a system that rewards visibility over substance.
As I wrote in my article “The Promotion Advice That’s Sabotaging Your Career”, the old playbook of “work hard, keep your head down, and wait your turn” made sense when organizations were built around stable hierarchies and predictable progression. In 2026, where middle management is shrinking and companies are simultaneously pressuring employees to do more while failing to create real paths forward, that playbook will get you stuck.
What to Do Instead
The professionals I’ve watched navigate this well over the past two years share a few things in common. They don’t play the theater game, but they also don’t ignore the reality that their work has to be seen and understood by the people making decisions. They have learned to communicate their impact in ways that are specific, outcome-oriented, and tied to problems the organization actually cares about, without padding or posturing.
If you find yourself in an organization where the culture rewards performance theater more than performance, you have a decision to make. You can adapt to the theater, which will likely keep you employed but will slowly erode the sharpness that makes you valuable in the first place. Or you can begin positioning yourself for what comes next: building the kind of reputation, network, and documented track record that makes you hireable on your own terms, in an organization where the incentives are better aligned.
In my article “Why Some Careers Accelerate After 40”, I explored how two professionals with similar resumes can see their trajectories diverge completely over a decade, and one of the biggest differentiators is whether they recognize early enough when they’re inside a system that isn’t set up to reward what they actually bring.
Performance theater has always existed. What’s different now is the scale, the AI layer, and the fact that organizations are feeling the cost of it without understanding where it’s coming from. If you’re a professional who creates real value and you’re tired of watching it go unrecognized, the answer isn’t to perform louder. The answer is to make sure your value is documented, visible, and positioned in the conversations that matter, whether that’s inside your current company or in the interview that changes everything.
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by Natalie Lemons
Natalie Lemons is the Founder and President of Resilience Group, LLC, and The Resilient Recruiter and Co-Founder of Need a New Gig. She specializes in the area of Executive Search and services a diverse group of national and international companies, focusing on mid to upper-level management searches in a variety of industries. For more articles like this, follow her blog. Resilient Recruiter is an Amazon Associate.