TL; DR: the perception of “ghost work” can also appear when employees work in functions where failure doesn’t immediately break the company. The work may have value, but the contributions support longer tails, look not needed. ———- I used to ask direct reports “how does what you are doing map to company strategies?” And if they could not do so we’d talk about what they were working on, how ‘mapping’ might work, and then decide if the work was worth it/ how to learn more about the company so their tactical was also strategic.

This was significantly easier in roles the company publicly supported. For roles where our team failure would destabilize things in a longer timeline, it was extremely easy to not be able to directly map to success, or feel fungible within the company.