My 2026 research project - mapping the hidden labour of digital work

I’m starting to plan my research project for 2026.

My focus in 2025 was on digital failure and you can find the report about that work, called Beyond the Promise, here.

The focus of this year's research will be understanding the scale and impact of the hidden labour of digital work.

Of course every role involves some hidden labour - the unlisted, necessary but often invisible work that keeps things moving. Although, in digital roles that hidden layer is often vast.

Because 'digital' is rarely well-defined and the specialist skills it demands aren’t always recognised or understood, the actual scope of digital work (of all kinds) almost always extends far beyond what most cultural organisations imagine it to be.

Digital roles are often both strategic and operational, and they are also usually both stretched across a wide range of responsibilities and under-resourced.

This means that digital professionals are constantly absorbing tasks that don’t appear on paper anywhere like dealing with workarounds to compensate for fragile systems, bridging role and skills gaps, advocating for digital work, or translating digital for colleagues.

Despite how common this experience seems to be, there has been remarkably little research into the scale, nature, or consequences of this hidden labour in the cultural sector. Most conversations rely on anecdotes, individual burnout stories, or post-hoc explanations of why projects struggled. Without evidence, even patterns that show up repeatedly across the sector (and this issue has presented itself on almost every project I've worked on over the last two decades) get treated as isolated incidents rather than as something that demands a structural response.

That leaves leaders making decisions about digital capacity and risk with almost no reliable evidence to work from, practitioners feeling like their difficult experience may be a one-off, funders unaware of the true brakes on impact, and suppliers unclear about why delivery so often feels harder than expected despite everything looking okay on paper.

Why this matters

Digital work in the cultural sector is often carried out by small teams or individuals, doing far more than their job description suggests or anyone really understands.

This hidden labour isn’t just a personal frustration, it’s also a systemic brake on digital effectiveness in our sector.

• For people, it creates stress, confusion, burnout, and attrition.
• For projects, it often means delays and missed opportunities.
• For organisations, it creates fragility, wasted resources, a lack of learning, and an illusion of capacity that doesn’t really exist. That illusion matters because it directly shapes decisions about what organisations think they can take on, how fast they think they can move, and how much risk they believe they are carrying, often without realising that those assumptions are being propped up by invisible and unacknowledged work.
• For the sector, it limits the ability to adapt to change and try new things. It also creates a huge problem with 'talent pipelines' for digital specialisms because people get fed up and leave the sector.

If we don’t understand its true scale and cost, we can’t make the case for better approaches to structures, staffing, and support. In practice, that means that roles stay poorly defined, projects are scoped unrealistically, investment cases fall apart under scrutiny, and 'resilience' is confused with finite endurance.

Over the past few months there have also been some very visible reminders of why this matters now. The recent British Library strike brought digital labour into focus, with staff describing doubled workloads and long periods of immense challenge trying to keep services going after the major cyber incident in 2023.

And the 2025 Arts Pay Report showed just how much the sector already runs on unrecognised extra work, blurred roles, and a steady expansion of expectations that is rarely recognised in job descriptions or budgets.

Put together, these stories start to demonstrate that questions about the hidden labour around digital work aren’t just a marginal issue or a personal frustration. They're part of a wider set of issues which shape capacity, wellbeing, and organisational effectiveness across the sector.

That is why it feels important to understand this properly and to bring better language and better evidence to something that many people have been dealing with silently for years.

My experience

This is a bit of a 'back to the future' focus for me. My first in-house role at a cultural organisation was as that organisation's first Digital Manager. My role was, in hindsight, very vaguely defined.

What this meant is that it covered everything you might expect, and a whole load of stuff that you might not.

I was a team of one. Most regularly I worked with marketing and communications, but I also found myself contributing to, leading, or supporting projects in education, fundraising, artistic commissioning, technical, company management, and IT.

I was doing all of the doing, as well as having the ideas, making the plans, making presentations to the board, supporting SMT discussions, training colleagues, answering questions, and doing peer-to-peer work with colleagues at other cultural organisations.

It was really exciting, but it was also stressful, exhausting, and far bigger than the job title suggested. In reality, a reasonable interpretation of my job description only covered maybe half of what I actually did and I don't think anyone really understood the scope or scale of my responsibilities.

That experience has stayed with me - and I've heard, and observed, similar situations in many other cultural organisations over the years. That’s one of the reasons why I’m interested in uncovering the real scale of this hidden burden today.

What this will involve

This research will have three strands:

1. An anonymous survey to capture a wide range of experiences and perspectives.
2. A diary study following the daily work of specific digital professionals over a three-week period in late-Spring 2026 (volunteers welcome).
3. One-to-one interviews to dig into the real stories behind the data.

I hope that this work will allow me to build and share a really well-informed picture of how digital professionals in the sector are spending their time, and the effect that this 'invisible work' is having (or not having) on timelines, impact, and morale.

It should make it possible to describe, with evidence, how digital work actually happens, where the pressure points sit, and what that means for realistic planning, resourcing, and expectations.

Until this work is visible, much of the sector will continue to diagnose its digital challenges as problems of ambition or skill, rather than as problems of structure, load, and support.

Get involved

If you’re doing digital work in, or with, a cultural organisation - whether you’re leading teams and strategy, running projects, or making it all happen behind the scenes, I’d love to include your perspective.

You can take part in three ways:

• Fill in the anonymous survey when it opens in March.
• Volunteer for the diary study to track your work over three weeks later this Spring.
• Join a short one-to-one interview with me to share your experience in more depth.

I am also putting together a small advisory group to give early feedback on the work - if you're interested in being involved in this then drop me a note ([email protected]) and we can chat.

Sharing the findings

I anticipate that the findings of this work will be published in the late Summer / early Autumn of 2026. As with last year there will be a report and accompanying tools and resources.

One clear lesson I learned from 2025's project is just how much work is involved in turning the reseach and analysis into something that is useful and usable for the wider sector so I won't be rushing this. I'm also fortunate this year to be supported by a number of partners who will be helping me to share the results once I have them. If you or your organisation are interested in supporting this work then get in touch: [email protected].

And if you have any thoughts or questions about this project please just drop me an email: [email protected].