Guide · Executive Productivity

The Hidden Cost of Pseudo-Productivity

By Smartex · ~6–8 min read

What is Pseudo-Productivity?

Busy isn’t the same as productive… In most organisations, the loudest signal of progress is activity - emails sent, meetings attended, updates delivered and people saying “I’m too busy”. But much of that “work” is coordination, unnecessary administration and rework. It looks busy, feels urgent, and quietly erodes focus, quality, and morale.

This is what we call ‘Pseudo-productivity’ - high activity with low productivity.

What we mean by pseudo-productivity

Pseudo-productivity shows up various ways across most organisations, some of the more familiar ways are:

• Work about work – Time spent coordinating rather than delivering. Frequent status meetings, duplicate updates, manual reporting, and approval ping-pong that eat into hours each week without moving outcomes forward.
• Goalpost shifting – When priorities from above change too often or too vaguely, teams spend more time adjusting and re-doing than delivering. This churn creates hidden rework and erodes confidence in direction.
• Signal loss – Without clear boundaries between role related core duties and admin tasks, people’s weeks fragment. Deep work gets disrupted by emails, pings, and minor requests, making it harder to distinguish what really matters.
• Tool sprawl – Messages and files scattered across too many platforms. Teams jump between chat apps, inboxes, and shared drives, often unsure where the latest “truth” lives. The result is duplication, distraction, and wasted effort disguised as progress.

Please see below our simple visualisation of the positive and negative differences between Productivity and Pseudo-productivity, which are all too often blurred and confused in the day-to-day running of an organisation:

What causes pseudo-productivity?

Pseudo-productivity in business is caused by a mix of psychological and structural factors that emphasise the appearance of work over meaningful results.

Two of the main root causes to watch out for are :

Psychological: Intentional pseudo-productivity (empire building)

Some individuals seek importance through control – being in every thread, chairing every meeting, and creating dependencies that only they can unblock. Beneath this behaviour is often low self-esteem and fear of failure, a need to prove one’s self, amplified by weak management, and sometimes even encouraged by certain types of management who enjoy drama. The result: needless task coordination, bottlenecks in productivity, and hidden resistance to positive change.

Often these individuals are insubordinate, have their own agendas, and may sabotage the greater good for personal gain. Whether they do this intentionally or not may not be too obvious, even to themselves.

Read more on this topic: Empire Building in the Workplace.

Structural: System-driven overwhelm (lack of considered control)

Most pseudo-productivity is not intentional nor malicious. It stems from a lack of strategic aim, unclear direction at the top and inefficient systems throughout. Staff drown in shifting priorities, manual handovers, tool sprawl, and endless reporting – the week dissolves into admin instead of progress.

How can we identify and measure Pseudo-productivity?

By using Smartex’s unique, copyrighted design and system that monitors pseudo-productivity signals, and combines the data within its EIS, alerting the C-suite when certain practices become apparent via Smartex’s pretrained algorithms.

How Smartex helps

For Cause A – The psychological aspect:

• Corporate governance safeguard – Smartex’s rules-based backbone keeps business objectives and board duties in view, aligned with company law, anchoring decisions in compliance and data rather than personal agenda. By keeping the C-suite level individuals on track and preventing them from straying to satisfy their own personal agendas. This tight structure and good practice from the top will precipitate down through the ranks. As well as this, Smartex’s EIS will help the C-suite to ensure that the business has a clear strategic plan, a technology infrastructure to support it, with the right systems in place, and a clear set of instructions to its team on how to achieve their goals and ultimately, the businesses strategy.
• Productivity Pipeline – monitors and alerts the board to high administration overhead and pseudo-productive patterns early, so leaders can prevent pseudo-productive behaviour before it becomes an issue.
• TCOD (Time Consumption of Duties) – reveals where time really goes by job role/individual, without surveillance, mapped directly to your EIS. This allows a dissectible view across all tasks, team productivity and process efficiency and effectiveness.

For Cause B – Structural inefficiencies:

• KPI Dashboard – with processes defined and easily controlled at board level, objective metrics reduce narrative-driven decisions; exceptions are visible to all, not gatekept by individuals.
• Role and process clarity – mapped ownership and handoffs make it harder for individuals to manufacture bottlenecks to achieve their own sense of purpose.
• Automation roadmap – Smartex will help you to analyse and produce a phased workflow and automation implementation plan that will ultimately simplify work and reduces manual tasks where available.
• Single source of truth – Smartex centralises key metrics and process views, eliminating tool sprawl and confusion.

What Pseudo-productivity could be costing you

At Smartex, we’re not here to scare you into adopting our EIS. We care about your business, your staff, and making modern work healthier, ultimately reducing the increasing mental load our digital world creates and hopefully creating a best practice framework for all businesses.

Use Smartex’s pseudo-productivity calculator with your own assumption for “cost per knowledge worker”. A 2019 UK survey suggested £4,500 per unproductive worker per year is lost through distractions, inefficient meetings, and poor systems (Totaljobs). In 2025, the picture is more intense, with rising digital distraction from constant notifications, context switching, and tool sprawl. UK workers report frequent loss of focus in meetings, with UK-wide estimates putting distraction in meetings at around £20 billion per year (QEII Centre, 2024 follow-up , full report PDF). For per-employee context, recent research estimates ~$4,480 per employee per year wasted on unproductive meetings alone, before counting other forms of digital distraction (LSE, 2024 , report PDF). And in day-to-day work, a third of UK employees are distracted by a digital notification every ~15 minutes (People Management, 2024).

Closing thought

Most people want to do meaningful work. Digital distraction and pseudo-productivity are system problems that obscure that intent. Smartex helps leaders restore focus by making deep work visible, aligning roles and processes, and turning signals into actions.

In practice, Smartex reduces digital distraction by centralising the single source of truth for KPIs, clarifying ownership and handoffs, and highlighting low-value loops early via the Productivity Pipeline and TCOD. The result is fewer pings, fewer meetings, and more measurable progress.

Back to topics

Costs · Non-conformance & Control

The Iceberg Effect - The Real Cost of Non-conformance

By Smartex · ~6–7 min read

In every business the Cost of Poor Quality (also known as the Cost of Failure or the Iceberg Effect) is a hidden danger. We only see the tip of it, while below the surface it drains company resources and strains a positive company culture, employee experience, and customer satisfaction, as rework is needed to bring things back on track after Non-conformance occurs. There are only a few individuals in each company who appreciate these hidden costs arising from Costs of Non-conformance, typically accountants and engineers who learn Lean Six Sigma and getting things right first time through their academic studies, as well as naturally pragmatic, practically-minded individuals. The reality is that too few people in modern business have an innovation mindset to recognise and control these hidden costs, and this issue should be highlighted, not ignored.

Even when systems are available, a lack of structure and control undermines them, keeping qualified individuals from leading. Too often, influential individuals lead poorly structured meetings to satisfy their own sense of self-importance, instead of using an optimal, best-practice framework that empowers qualified leaders to guide the organisation. Certain ego-driven individuals can sabotage progress, resisting structure, dismissing expertise, and derailing collaboration in pursuit of personal control.

Often these types of unstructured meetings become silent breeding grounds for egoic and opinionated individuals to do what they want, and not what’s best for business, as this type of individual usually has a strong opinion and big ego that can overrule the qualified individuals, causing these individuals to shy away. Ultimately this type of behaviour leads to vanity projects and a ‘Tail Wagging the Dog’ culture, all of which lead to Costs of Non-conformance.

Whilst ambition and flair are welcome in business; ego isn’t, and that’s why businesses need structure and qualified individuals to keep operations on the right track. That’s where Smartex comes in.

Designed by an experienced CIMA Chartered Global Management Accountant who has experienced many management and board meetings, observing the basics of planning and prevention control practices for various processes being overruled by opinion and ego, as some individuals in meetings sought to be heard, Smartex is informed by extensive first-hand experience at the executive level of the Costs of Poor Quality having a significant, detrimental impact on businesses. A prime example in two separate organisations was the number one ranked cost type listed below ‘Product Defects’, predominantly caused by a lack of Prevention and Appraisal investment being objectively applied at managerial level, especially weaknesses at the most critical stage of new product development: testing.

Many of the other following examples listed below have also been observed over time by our founder, as we’re sure that you have also experienced some, if not all, of these examples at some point during your career. This is why a robust, rules-based framework is required and targeted staff training (specifically in the practice of Lean Six Sigma), to curb such excitable egoic behaviour and give business owners and executives the ability to balance vanity with sanity across their operations. Using Smartex’s focus on process mapping, employee collaboration ‘led by qualified individuals’ and an innovation mindset, these critical business elements are efficiently dealt with in a considered and pragmatic way, preventing unnecessary Non-conformance pitfalls, and individuals straying from the company’s collective strategic path.

This blog explores why structure, qualification, and humility are the real foundations of control, and why overlooking them costs more than you think.

Please take a quick look at our basic illustration below of the four categories that make up the Costs of Quality and Poor Quality.

Top 10 Costs of Quality in Business (Ranked)

We’ve listed some of the most common examples of Costs of Poor Quality below:

1. Product or Service Defects - Rework, scrap, replacements, and warranty claims.
2. Customer Complaints & Returns - Handling refunds, replacements, and damaged reputation.
3. Lost Productivity - Time wasted fixing avoidable issues or redoing work.
4. Staff Turnover - Recruitment, onboarding, and knowledge loss costs.
5. Shipping or Order Errors - Wrong deliveries, returns, and customer dissatisfaction.
6. Process Downtime - Production or service interruptions while resolving problems.
7. Administrative Rework - Correcting invoices, data entry errors, or compliance mistakes.
8. Missed Deadlines or Delays - Penalties, lost clients, and overtime costs.
9. Reputational Damage - Erosion of trust, lost opportunities, and reduced pricing power.
10. Regulatory or Compliance Failures - Fines, legal fees, and mandated corrective actions.

Most of us have experienced a few of these in some way, but it’s important to recognise the full scope of Costs of Poor Quality, to see the body of the iceberg, not just the tip.

For a deeper look, see below for a helpful article by Indeed on the Costs of Poor Quality, plus a case study on Toyota’s accelerator pedal incident, a real-world example of how hidden quality failures can snowball into extreme costs, in many ways, not just financial.

Cost of Poor Quality Article and Case Study

The Iceberg Effect Multiplier - estimate your hidden costs

As you can see from our Indeed example (there are many other examples available for you to Google search) and the Toyota case study above, companies often experience hidden costs well beyond the visible line items, especially companies dealing with the public. Assuming that you have already read our feature blog "What is an EIS, and Do You Have One?", you can follow this up by using our calculator below to apply a very conservative hidden-cost multiplier of 2.5 to your existing Direct / Visible Costs total.

If you’re yet to read our featured blog “What is an EIS, and Do You Have One?”, please click the link text to read the blog and get an idea of your own business’s more obvious and avoidable costs.

You can also manually adjust our pre-determined 2.5 multiplier to see your own “what if” Iceberg Effect for Costs of Non-conformance.

Toyota’s case illustrates an enormous Cost of Poor Quality (COPQ) multiplier, albeit that Toyota’s example is for product defects in a manufacturing environment. Our calculator is designed to illustrate these various types of hidden costs.

For Toyota, a modest prevention and appraisal spend to get the accelerator pedal and floor mat design right is estimated at about $30k, which could have averted large internal and external failure costs. Subsequent direct recall costs, criminal and legal penalties, lost sales and reputation damage, and increased marketing and incentives have been estimated at about $2bn, with some estimates as high as $5.5bn. That implies a CoPQ multiplier of roughly 66,700:1 at $2bn, and up to about 183,000:1 at $5.5bn, versus the upfront fix.

These are the true hidden costs that your business is likely to be experiencing at the moment, and honest, conservative savings that we think Smartex can bring to your business now, and for the foreseeable future.

Why this matters now

Understanding the Costs of Non-conformance and the Iceberg Effect is crucial for businesses to avoid hidden expenses, improve efficiency, enhance reputation, and ensure regulatory compliance. The "Iceberg Effect" reminds businesses that the visible costs like (manually inputting work, scrapped inventory items etc.) are just a fraction of the total cost, which includes hidden, submerged costs like lost productivity, reputational damage, decreased customer experience and most importantly in this ever increasing age of workplace digitisation is ‘employee satisfaction and mental health’.

New strains and challenges confront employers surrounding the uncertainty of A.I in the workplace becoming more prevalent. (Please read our blog on this subject ‘AI in the Workplace: Stressor or Solution?’ for further details).

Closing thought

Smartex isn’t just an ordinary Executive Information System and a piece of software, it’s a cultural change management platform, a way to subtly shift the ‘stick in the mud’ mindsets to a positive and innovative way of thinking, it’s a collaboration philosophy designed to reduce stress in the workplace and increase productivity, and we look forward to welcoming you onboard to help your business, its customers and your staff to thrive.

Back to topics

Opinion · Future of Work

AI in the Workplace: Stressor or Solution?

By Smartex · ~4 min read

Artificial Intelligence is reshaping the modern workplace. For many organisations, AI can be both a stressor and a solution. When introduced without care, it amplifies noise, uncertainty, and rework. When implemented responsibly, it relieves cognitive load, enhances focus, and frees people to do their best thinking. Smartex helps leaders adopt AI where it genuinely improves process flow while protecting the wellbeing of their teams.

The dual nature of AI

• Productivity booster – summarisation, data prep, workflow automation, and report generation.
• Anxiety amplifier – tool sprawl, unclear ownership, weak communication, and job-security worries.

Why anxiety grows

Most people like to be in control. When AI arrives without explanation or the offer of participation, it removes that sense of control and triggers uncertainty, it can even go as far as to create fear for individuals jobs as some people assume that AI will replace them. People wonder what will change, who will be making the decisions, and how success will be measured. The technology itself isn’t the problem — the communication and inclusion around it are.

Participatory AI Enablement (how Smartex helps)

Smartex introduces a new concept called Participatory AI Enablement — allowing employees to identify where automation or AI could genuinely help them in their role, and free up time to produce more ‘Deep Work’. Within the Time Consumption of Duties (TCOD) framework, each task can be flagged with two optional markers:

• Automation Opportunity – the task is repetitive or rules-based and could be automated.
• AI Assistance Opportunity – the task could benefit from prediction, summarisation, or decision support.

Employees can also leave notes suggesting specific ideas (for example, “Use Copilot to summarise daily reports”). These bottom-up insights give executives a real-time view of where their people see value, creating a culture of transparency and collaboration instead of uncertainty and fear.

How the Productivity Pipeline validates AI

By using the pre-programmed heat map visual overlays, Executives can identify movement in the following areas

• Validate that AI reduces steps or decisions for end users, not adds new ones.
• Confirm that automation truly removes admin rather than shifting it to another team.
• Track post-implementation outcomes such as focus time, rework, and wellbeing signals.
• Review regularly to ensure benefits persist and scope creep is avoided.

Some negative leadership signals to watch out for

• Meeting volume rises while deep-work time falls: When new tools arrive, teams often schedule extra check-in meetings to “align,” but these meetings consume the very focus time that AI is meant to protect. If the calendar fills up faster than workflows simplify, the system may be adding more stress than solution.
• Outputs speed up but quality jitters and rework increase: Rapid automation can inflate activity without improving outcomes. As some AI interfaces require human supervision, when mistakes slip through because oversight hasn’t caught up with new speeds, quality drops and trust erodes. This is a warning sign that process redesign hasn’t kept pace with technology.
• Teams experience burnout and lose sight of focused productivity: AI should relieve cognitive load, not replace it with fear of obsolescence or constant context-switching while supervising new systems. If wellbeing scores, work engagement, or creativity decline, the rollout may be overloading people rather than empowering them.
• Pilots launch quickly but training and governance lag behind: New project enthusiasm can drive fast experimentation, but without user readiness, project scope and clear accountability, early wins can stall or backfire. People need confidence in how AI decisions are made, who owns the implementation, and where boundaries lie. Without that structure, adoption creates more stress than solution, and trust erodes.

Closing thought

AI adoption doesn’t have to create uncertainty and divide the workplace. By inviting people to help shape how and where automation appears, leaders transform anxiety into collaboration. Using the TCOD system, Smartex provides the framework to measure AI adoption impact, protect employee wellbeing, and ensure that technology serves the process and the people.

“With Smartex, AI becomes a trusted ally - structured, transparent, and aligned with how people actually work.”

If you're ready to join Smartex, please review our About Smartex page, register Your interest and Join the beta, and we’ll be in touch…

Thank you very much for taking the time to explore our system, we look forward to working with you in the near future.

Explore the Productivity PipelineBack to topics