In every organization, there is work that is visible and work that makes everything else possible. The former appears in objectives, plans, reports, and performance evaluations. The latter happens beneath the surface: coordinating people who do not communicate with each other, turning friction into something productive, keeping information flowing, helping another team overcome a roadblock, catching an error before it reaches the customer, turning tension into a useful conversation. This work is often crucial. But precisely because it prevents problems, it is rarely recognized.
There is a form of value that only becomes visible when it is missing. Nobody measures how many meetings have been avoided thanks to a phone call made at the right moment. Or the value of information shared before it became urgent. Nobody gives credit to those who hold together parts of the organization that belong to different silos. When everything works, that work disappears. When it is not done, delays, conflicts, duplication, escalations, disappointed customers, and decisions made too late begin to appear.
Many companies call for collaboration, integration, and speed, yet continue to reward primarily individual and visible results. Fine. But if we only look at what each person achieves within their own area of responsibility, we lose sight of what prevents those boundaries from becoming walls.
Invisible work is an organizational infrastructure. It is not the same as kindness. Nor is it simply a willingness to help. It is the everyday work that increases the likelihood of the system functioning as a system. It is the constant activity that runs across the organization to connect, clarify, translate, anticipate, and bring things back together. A kind of silent tax borne by the people who are more competent, more responsible, or more attentive to how the organization functions as a whole.
This is where a paradox emerges. The people who do this work are often considered valuable, but they do not necessarily advance in their careers. They are the ones who “keep things running”, whom everyone turns to when a situation needs to be resolved, who understand where the workflow gets stuck. Yet performance evaluation systems do not always capture that contribution through a specific indicator. It does not always have a name that comes up in career discussions. As a result, the organization consumes the very thing that enables it to function.
The risk is twofold. On the one hand, those who perform invisible work become overloaded and end up paying the price for the integration that the system itself fails to ensure. On the other hand, those who observe learn. They learn that helping other teams does not pay off. That staying silent brings more benefits than raising an issue. That coordination takes time, but time taken away from one’s own objectives can become a disadvantage. At that point, people stop being collaborative because the environment teaches them where to invest their energy.
Of course, not all invisible work creates value. Sometimes it merely compensates for poor organizational design: unnecessary procedures, excessively long decision-making processes, unclear roles, meetings created to fix what a process fails to manage. Over time, this does not generate value, because those problems should be made explicit, addressed, and resolved. That is why it is important to distinguish between the two. Which invisible work creates value by connecting people’s intelligence and preventing waste? And which, instead, covers up dysfunctions that should be eliminated?
Are senior leaders aware of the contributions that truly hold the organization together? Does the business look only at individual performance, or can it also recognize the contribution of those who connect the different parts? And does HR have evaluation, development, and career systems that also recognize those who create the conditions for others to work better?
Companies do not function only thanks to what is produced, measured, and rewarded. They function thanks to a great deal of work that supports the work of others. If we continue to reward only what is visible, we risk weakening the very thing that holds us together.
by Marina Capizzi, author of Hierarchy To die or to Thrive?
This is the English translation of the article published on “Il Sole 24Ore” (October 12th 2026)