The Hidden Cost report is out today - here's what I found

When I first started looking into the issue of hidden digital labour earlier this year, I wasn't sure how widespread or impactful the problem might be.

I knew I'd experienced versions of it throughout my career, and had regularly observed people (clients, friends, peers) struggling with it. But I was wary of drawing too many conclusions from what was really up until then just my own experience.

But I have been surprised just how widespread the issue seems to be, just how clearly repeated the forms of hidden work are, and how significant the impact is.

There is a clear and seemingly-growing gap between what digital work is assumed to involve and require, and what the reality involves. That gap, between the job as it's written and assumed to exist, and the job as it's actually experienced, is what my new report is about. It's called The Hidden Cost, and it's out today.

I'm really grateful to the two project partners, DEN and Manifesto, whose support made this whole undertaking possible.

I wanted to share some of the headline figures that emerged from the research I ran earlier this year - through which I received 187 survey responses, and conducted 15 in-depth interviews.

I heard from digital practitioners at all levels of seniority, working in 15 different countries, in organisations large and small, across art forms and disciplines. But regardless of that diversity, the story that they were all telling was remarkably similar, that a significant portion of the average digital practitioner's workload is hidden, unrecognised, and unsupported and whilst this work is absolutely necessary, it never appears in a plan, a job description, a budget, or a formal understanding of what the work involves.

But before I dive into the numbers, I want to be clear that the problem of hidden work is endemic and structural. It's not a quirk of your organisation, your competence, or your particular situation.

Some key findings:

• The most commonly reported hidden workload was between half a day and a full day, most weeks, and 5% of respondents were dealing with more than 15 hours of hidden work most weeks.
• The largest categories of hidden work by volume were not the technical ones. They are the relational labour required to operate horizontally, across organisations that are structured vertically.
• 65% said work outside their planned responsibilities had caused project delays in the last six months and 67% said it had led to planned work being dropped or reduced.
• Only 11% agreed their wider organisation understands what their role involves.
• 72% of the people I heard from find the work meaningful. This isn't about work they don't care about, but 72% said they feel worn out at the end of the working day, 58% said they feel emotionally drained, and 56% struggle to recover their energy between days.
• And perhaps most damningly, 62% of the survey respondents had considered leaving their role in the last 12 months, and that intent to leave was highest amongst those with the largest hidden workloads.

The report goes into much more detail than I will do here. It sets out six types of hidden work, four levels of visibility at which the work exists, and the seven structural conditions that keep generating it. It looks at what all of this costs, for people, for organisations, and for the sector.

There's also a full section on what needs to change - the short version is that this is really a prioritisation problem before it's a resource problem. Only 21% of practitioners said they feel able to say no to work outside their remit, and only 23% of them get their workload adjusted when they take extra on.

If you do this work, I hope the report gives you something solid and useful to point at and help support conversations you're trying to have. The exhaustion, the sense that your one job has somehow become three jobs, the suspicion that you're the only thing standing between a system and its failure - these are not signs that you're managing badly. They're what these conditions produce, in almost everyone, almost everywhere. You didn't make them, and you can't be expected to fix them alone.

Ok, that's enough for now, I hope you get a chance to read the report - I've spent most of the last three months writing it, and it feels like an important issue for us to talk about more and attempt to resolve.

Let me know what you think.

Ash