Sorry, I have a job description

Somewhere along the way, many of us learned to treat work as a test of our worth.

We want to be the most reliable person in the room. We want our managers to trust us, our colleagues to like us, and our employers to recognise how much we contribute. We want to prove that we deserve our salaries, our promotions, and our place at the table.

Ambition’s great. Doing good work matters. Being dependable matters. Taking pride in what you do matters.

But there is a difference between doing your job well and constantly trying to prove that you deserve to have one.

Many workplaces reward the performance of work over the actual work. Other than doing your job, you must also look sufficiently exhausted doing it. And those who refuse to participate in this little corporate theatre soon discover that professionalism has an unwritten price: a smile when you’re annoyed, enthusiasm when you’re exhausted, and silence when you disagree. The price of refusing to perform is paid in hours you never get back, opinions you learn to swallow, and dignity you gradually learn to bargain away. Obviously, none of it appears in the job description.

Is it just me, or is everyone performing to be productive?

Now imagine the camera panning out, with you standing next to me. We’re going out for a day at an average office in Bangladesh.

Looking busy

It is six in the evening. Nobody leaves before the boss does, and the boss knows it. Because they have given the employees enough on that already. The lights stay on, and the traffic outside is a convenient excuse for sitting a little longer.

Now watch the other side. An analyst finishes her work by half past five, packs up at six and leaves. Within months her appraisal calls her “not a team player.” Her work didn’t change. What changed is the visibility of her “performance.”

None of this is in anyone’s job description.

We have somehow arrived at a workplace culture where the arrangement is remarkably simple: the company pays you to work, you learn to look busy, and everyone agrees to call the performance productivity. God forbid you call it unpaid overtime. Management just creates an environment in which declining it requires the courage of a whistle-blower.

To be fair, some work is difficult to measure. Managers need to see progress, employees must communicate their availability, and staying late can occasionally be necessary. The problem occurs when looking productive becomes more important than producing anything useful.

Then there are the meetings. Every meeting is a performance review, and the performance being reviewed is someone’s dignity. I know an employee who can predict the outcome of every meeting management calls. It ends with the employees accepting responsibility for the business failing.

Colleagues are happy to share survival tips. “Take it from me,” one advises, with the confidence of a seasoned industry veteran. “I actually start working around 5 p.m. so I can finish late and show the higher-ups how hardworking I am.”

Apparently, the secret to professional success is not getting the work done, but ensuring the right people witness you suffering through it.

I thanked him. And that, too, was a performance.

Performing a personality

You could argue that likeability and social competence are not always superficial. I agree. Interpersonal skills exist to help people work together. But there is a difference between learning to work with people and performing a personality that makes everyone comfortable.

Then suddenly, being good at your job turns out to be half the job. The rest is knowing how to behave.

I watch people pile on layers of materialism, status anxiety, and carefully rehearsed personalities until there’s barely any room left for an actual person underneath. Everyone is networking, everyone is performing, and everyone seems to know exactly which version of themselves will get them ahead. I start to wonder whether I’m at work or trapped in a very expensive group project where everyone is competing for the teacher’s favourite.

I realise how hostile this sounds, but not everyone can develop an ulterior motive just to stay afloat at work. Some want to be paid for the work and spared the social demands. Some have philosophies against making work their whole life. Some just can’t fit in. They are the ones who discover the invisible price of belonging, because they are the ones who refuse to pay it.

And I am not above any of this. For a long time, my answer was radical acceptance: there’s no way out but through fakeness. That’s what I told myself, and I put on the clown mask and joined the corporate circus more often than I’d like to admit. I still keep my distance at times. I can only spend so many hours pretending to find the circus entertaining.

Underperformance and disengagement

Employees have stopped believing that going above and beyond will get them anywhere beyond more work. A 2026 qualitative study published in Independent Business Review, titled From Burnout to Boundaries: What Drives Quiet Quitting in Today’s Workforce?, found that satisfaction and motivation are shaped by equity, trust, commitment to the organisation and appreciation. Take those away and a withdrawal of effort is hardly a mystery.

And on the other side, management pitches: why do the bare minimum when you could do twice the work for the same salary? It is a question it hopes you’ll never stop asking yourself.

I’d say it’s a rational withdrawal of effort. That is not to say that every employee who feels undervalued is performing adequately. Some employees do avoid responsibility, and workplace culture cannot excuse every failure. Some exploit workplace flexibility, procrastinate, miss deadlines and blame the system when their colleagues have to compensate for them.

The question is whether the workplace has a credible way to distinguish genuine underperformance from justified disengagement. The colleague who starts working at 5 p.m. is neither. He is staging. A workplace that can’t tell the three apart will punish whoever looks least busy.

That’s why accountability should focus on actual outcomes instead of a theatre of dedication. Not everything can be measured, but what a person was responsible for, and whether it got done, is a far better measure than who was visibly suffering at nine at night.

The next scene?

Job-hopping

Companies don’t hesitate to point fingers at a fatal character flaw: job-hopping. Employers hate the sinner, but seem remarkably untroubled by the sin itself. The employee who resigns is showcased as “fired” and the workplace that gives them reason to leave is simply doing business.

Of course, changing jobs constantly can damage professional relationships, prevent you from developing expertise and make employers question your reliability. But staying in one place long enough to perfect the art of being underpaid, overworked, and chronically disappointed is hardly a career strategy either.

Apparently, the ideal employee has the ambition of an entrepreneur, the availability of a call centre, and the bargaining power of a houseplant. But none of us are robots. Some of us are dependable, cooperative, adaptable and willing to do difficult work, as expected of us.

But do we really reward the appearance of those qualities more than the qualities themselves?

So, what really makes a job worth staying for?

Quality of work life

The alternative isn’t exotic. Every job involves pressure, compromise and the occasional unpleasant task, and I’m not asking for a job without them.

Until that happens, I urge you to stop saying “happy to help” when you are, in fact, deeply unhappy to help. One person’s refusal can’t fix a structural problem, which is why the real fix is for workplaces to stop charging the price.

And if the villain of your office story is simply a person who does not pay the invisible price of belonging, perhaps the real problem is not the villain. The story is the one I started with, the one where you must keep proving you deserve the job you already have.

Perhaps it is the story.

Santana Kamal is a freelance creative and marketing professional.