Janelle E. Wells, Ph.D., and Doreen MacAulay, Ph.D.
Our (In)visible Work
It’s a scenario that keeps leaders awake at night: A top-performing employee who consistently demonstrates initiative, embraces learning, and delivers oversized value abruptly quits.
Management is left blindsided, having mistaken high output for high engagement. What is the reality? The employee didn’t feel engaged with the work or the organization; they felt invisible. This reveals a critical, modern threat to organizations. The most significant risk isn’t the employee doing the bare minimum; instead, it is the high performer doing the maximum for the minimum reward. This costly phenomenon is popularly becoming known as ghost growth.
Ghost growth is the silent, unrewarded development of your talent. They aren’t quitting. They’re growing—taking initiative, learning new skills, absorbing departed colleagues’ responsibilities, and mastering new technology and systems.
Ghost growth is invisible to the organization. It’s unrecognized. It’s unacknowledged. It’s when we ask for innovation and grit, but then the employee’s title doesn’t change, and their pay doesn’t budge. This quiet betrayal of the modern workplace was identified 25 years ago in the Journal of Applied Psychology, and if it continues will silently kill workplace engagement and drive high-performer burnout. Also, if we don’t learn to see and reward this invisible labor, the best employees will, quite fittingly, just disappear.
The good news is that this is manageable. It doesn’t require a massive budget, but it does require a fundamental shift in how organizations and leaders see work and how employees bring visibility to their work.
Organizations Need Agility
If the system itself is rigid, employees and leaders can only do so much. An organization’s structure should be agile enough to reward growth as it happens. The annual promotion cycle is a relic. If an employee’s capabilities have outpaced their title by June, waiting until next April to acknowledge them is a formal invitation to your competitors. According to the Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and Performance, organizations must focus on employees’ work and organizational engagement by building pathways for agile advancement opportunities.
HR departments must audit compensation and leveling systems, asking themselves if we are still paying for the static, five-year-old job description or for the value the person is delivering today? If a Junior Coordinator has been performing at a Senior Strategist level, their title and pay should reflect reality. If not, the doors of your competitors will invite them to join.
