The Roomba School of Management: When Everyone Looks Slammed but Nothing Gets Done

By 9:15 a.m., the newly hired manager, brought in to “turn things around,” realized no one in her department worked—they performed work. Laptops glowed, brows furrowed, Slack windows flashed like strobe lights. She hadn’t seen this much motion with so little progress since her Roomba tried to vacuum the stairs.

Everyone looked slammed—syncing, circling back, touching base, aligning priorities, and actioning next steps. The problem? None of these verbs produced anything tangible. Meetings multiplied like rabbits while projects stayed in limbo.

She’d inherited a team infected with FauxProductivity—the contagious workplace condition where everyone looks perpetually overwhelmed but few finish anything. It’s the corporate cousin of pretending to jog when you’re just bouncing in place for your smartwatch.

You’ve seen it. People sprint from meeting to meeting with lattes, eyes glazed. The colleague who hasn’t produced a deliverable since early last year but keeps a calendar dense enough to block sunlight. The team that spends more time “tracking progress” than making it. The Slack channel that pings so much you start to hear phantom notifications in your sleep.

The roots of FauxProductivity run deep. Some of it’s fear—if you look busy, no one questions your value. Some of it’s structural: endless tools that promise efficiency but mainly create more dashboards to update. And some of it comes from productivity paranoia: because managers of remote or hybrid employees can’t see them working, they add meetings, check-ins, and tracking systems, which cause employees to work longer just to look productive.

We’ve built workplaces where employees who respond instantly to Slack messages appear engaged, while those doing focused work seem invisible. Instead of producing results, we produce evidence of results. Screenshots. Decks. Endless “just circling back” emails.

The tragedy is that FauxProductivity burns people out faster than genuine work ever could. The toggling, messaging, and micromanaging of appearances leave employees drained. Everyone’s in motion, but nothing advances.

If this sounds familiar, you’re not powerless. You can detox an employee or team infected with FauxProductivity with a few brave steps, and one fewer meeting invite.

1. Measure output, not optics.

Stop rewarding the fastest responder in the chat. Reward clear outcomes instead. Replace “Who’s online?” with “What got done?” When you celebrate results, people stop performing effort and start producing value.

2. Protect focus time.

Deep work needs oxygen—long stretches without pings or pop-ups. Leaders can model this by blocking meeting-free hours. No “quick syncs.”

3. Audit your meetings.

FauxProductivity flourishes in over-meeting environments. Ask two questions: Why does this meeting exist? What will we decide? If no one can answer, cancel it. The sun will still rise.

4. Manage by results. 

Real productivity creates value—here’s the test—

Real productivity: Finishing the client proposal and sending it.

Busy work: Rewriting the executive summary because someone doesn’t like the word “innovative.”

Real productivity: Making a clear decision in a meeting and assigning next steps.

Busy work: Scheduling another meeting to “finalize” what everyone already agreed on.

5. Focus on priorities and payoffs.

Busy work makes reports about reports. Real work creates results worth reporting.

Turning around FauxProductivity starts with leaders who redefine what “good work” looks like—finished—so employees can trust their value lies in what they deliver, not how frenzied they appear.

By the end of her first month, that new manager had canceled half her team’s recurring meetings, deleted three project-tracking dashboards, and quietly banned the phrase “circle back.” Progress reports turned into results. The Slack lights still blinked but now like a disco and more like a heartbeat.

Real productivity hums. FauxProductivity buzzes. One moves you forward; the other just makes noise. And no one ever turned a department around by acting like a Roomba on a staircase.

2025 Lynne Curry, PhD, SPHR, SHRM-SCP