Not always invisible, but often hidden

When I started my hidden labour research project I was using the word 'invisible' a lot to describe the work I was looking into.

But I realised quite quickly that 'invisible' wasn't always the right word, because that implies the work was completely out of sight (not visible at all), and actually sometimes (a lot of the time) aspects of the work were visible, even if some (or most) of it remained hidden.

So after reading through over 180 survey responses and carrying out a bunch of interviews with people doing hidden work, I've arrived at what I hope is a useful 'scale of visibility' which describes the various states of visibility that this work can exist in.

A scale of visibility

There are, I think, four levels to this scale, from work that is actively suppressed, to work that is acknowledged but left unsupported. I hope this might be a useful frame to think about your own context and work through.

At Level 1, work is actively suppressed - practitioners have learned that identifying and drawing attention to this work usually means they’ll have to be responsible for it, or deal with other negative consequences (for example the extra workload brought on by replacing systems, introducing automation or AI, etc), so they have chosen not to actively raise it.

At Level 2, work is structurally invisible - it happens, it is depended upon, but there is no organisational language or structure to recognise or describe it. This is often an interstitial state and work passes through Level 2 before migrating to another level, typically when it produces a visible output. A practitioner becoming familiar with an emerging platform, idea or standard they sense will matter at some point (i.e. when they’re investing attention in something nobody has asked for yet), is doing Level 2 work which will only become noticeable retrospectively, when they turn out to be the person who understands the thing that suddenly matters.

A few forms of work tend to stick at Level 2 rather than passing through it. One is institutional knowledge - the understanding and remembering of how an organisation's systems, relationships and dependencies connect, this is often held inside someone's head and is shaping and informing every decision they make. With this type of work an organisation doesn't know it has it until it doesn't have it anymore, and even then the organisation often cannot describe exactly what it has lost. A second type is maintenance work, which is structurally invisible because functioning systems generate no signal of, or curiosity about, the labour required to keep them functioning. And a third is the relational and legitimation labour that is required to create the conditions in which digital work can be funded and delivered at all.

At Level 3, the output is visible but the effort is not - colleagues see, and often appreciate, the results without understanding what was involved in producing them and, as a result, frequently underestimate what is actually required to make digital work happen.

At Level 4, there is overt recognition and acknowledgement of what needs to happen but an accompanying shortfall in what should therefore be required in terms of resources and support.

Different types of hidden work clusters at different levels, and the same type of work can sit at different levels of visibility in different organisations.

A fuller version of this framework is detailed in the Hidden Cost report, which will be published next month (September). Alongside the scale, the report will set out a typology of the different types of hidden work (they behave quite differently from one another, and cluster at different levels of this scale), and an analysis of the structural conditions that produce and sustain them. It's illustrated throughout with specific examples drawn from the survey responses and the interviews I ran earlier this year.