One employee stopped working for a year. Nobody noticed.
Someone spent a year doing absolutely nothing at work. No one noticed.
That might sound like a tweet or an Instagram message. It’s not.
It’s a personal essay from Leyla Kazim, who after a great manager left and was replaced by someone with no real management skills, found herself in a role nobody could define. Rather than raise it, she ran an experiment. She stopped working entirely to see how long it would take to get caught.
Her tactics were simple. Spreadsheets she never updated. A few padded emails. A PowerPoint knocked together minutes before her weekly one-to-one. She left a year later, of her own accord, never having been found out.
Jenni brought this story to this week's episode of Frequency, and I want to be honest about my reaction. The easy take is to say I could never do that. I don't think I could, in practice. But I've sat with the question long enough to admit I understand how someone gets there.
When nobody’s paying attention, someone will notice the gap
A connected manager would have caught this early. A role with clear purpose would have made a year of nothing unsustainable. Neither of those things existed in Kazim's situation, so the experiment ran until she decided to end it.
While digging into this story, I found another one that makes Kazim look like an amateur. A manager whose employee quit never told anyone. They redirected that person's paycheck into their own bank account, hired Fiverr freelancers to do the work, and kept it going for a year. The "employee" joined Zoom calls with camera and mic conveniently broken, participating only in the chat.
Both are outliers. But they're pointing at something that isn't.
The data Behind the performance
David Graeber estimated that 20 to 50 percent of all jobs are what he called bullshit jobs. Roles so pointless that even the person doing them can't justify their existence. A 2015 YouGov poll found 37 percent of British workers felt their job contributed nothing meaningful.
Jenni tried the "just collect the paycheck" approach herself once. Two months in, her values pulled her out. Not everyone has that pull.
The stat that should land hardest for anyone in internal comms: 88 percent of remote workers say they actively go out of their way to look busy.
Not to be productive. To look busy.
That's the environment a lot of organisations have built. They rewarded presence over output for so long that the performance of work became the job itself. Perceived effort matters more than actual results, and people have noticed. They've adapted.
What this means for internal communicators
The Kazim story is easy to read as a management failure, and it is. But it's also a communication failure. Nobody defined what she owned. Nobody checked whether her work connected to anything meaningful. Nobody created the conditions where she could raise her hand and say the role made no sense.
That gap between what leaders assume people understand and what employees are actually experiencing shows up in organizations every day. Most people don't run a year-long experiment. They just quietly disengage and perform enough busyness to stay off the radar.
Closing that gap is communication work. It means being clear on roles, on purpose, on what success actually looks like. Not as a values exercise. As a daily operating condition.
The question worth sitting with: how many people in your organization right now are in Kazim's situation and just haven't decided to run the experiment yet?
Also in this episode: Jenni walked us through two new Firstup reports on employee engagement across the UK and North America. The headline numbers look healthy. What's underneath is a different story, and we'll be going deeper on that research separately this week.
We got into a Startups Magazine piece arguing that what most leaders diagnose as a culture problem is actually a clarity problem — ambiguous roles, undefined decision-making, and leaders who assume people know things they've never been told.
We also talked about return to office stats, including the finding that 25 percent of executives and 18 percent of HR workers admitted they hoped RTO mandates would push people to leave voluntarily.
Written by Chuck Gose, founder of ICology.
The Frequency Podcast
Real talk about comms, culture, and employee experience.
Chuck Gose and Jenni Field skip the buzzwords and get straight to what matters. New episodes every week.
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