Stewart Butterfield, the cofounder of Slack and one of the most influential voices in modern workplace technology, has issued a stark critique of contemporary work culture: both employees and executives are increasingly trapped in cycles of “fake work”—tasks that consume time, create the illusion of productivity, but contribute little to real progress.
In a recent discussion, Butterfield highlighted how companies, especially large ones, are slipping into patterns of performative efficiency rather than meaningful execution. Instead of focusing on decision-making, innovation, creativity, or customer value, teams often spend hours preparing for meetings, building slide decks no one reads twice, rehearsing “pre-meetings” before the real meetings, and generating documentation whose primary purpose is internal optics rather than external impact.
The comments strike a nerve at a moment when companies are reevaluating productivity, with hybrid work, digital overload, and AI-powered workflows reshaping the fabric of organizational life. Butterfield’s message is not simply about wasted time—it is about the growing misalignment between what companies think drives progress and what actually does.
The Anatomy of ‘Fake Work’: Meetings About Meetings
Butterfield argues that the modern workplace has become overrun with rituals that simulate productivity but rarely move the business forward. One of the biggest offenders, he says, is the proliferation of pre-meetings—internal discussions designed to prepare for the actual meeting.
These pre-meetings often involve:
- aligning narratives before presenting to leadership,
- rehearsing how to answer expected questions,
- debating slide colors, formats, and text placement,
- and circulating decks for approvals that seldom alter the core content.
The result is a layered system of meetings about meetings, decision-making about decision-making, and discussions that create the appearance of alignment rather than true clarity.
Butterfield notes that executives themselves are far from immune. Even CEOs, he says, can get pulled into cycles of performative work—signing off on decks, attending status updates, and participating in meetings designed to justify the existence of other meetings.
The Slide-Deck Industrial Complex
A second category of fake work, according to Butterfield, is the massive time investment in creating slide presentations. In many companies, producing a deck has become a proxy for showing professionalism or preparedness—even when the same information could be conveyed in a paragraph, a dashboard, or a five-minute conversation.
He describes slide creation as a “shadow workflow,” one that often takes more time and cognitive effort than the work the slides describe. Employees may create dozens of slides summarizing progress that would be better depicted through live demos, real metrics, or straightforward summaries.
The net effect is a system in which form overtakes substance.
How Digital Tools Made the Problem Worse
Ironically, tools designed to improve communication—Slack included—may also contribute to digital noise, Butterfield admits. The explosion of messaging platforms, asynchronous collaboration tools, shared workspaces, and productivity apps means that workers are constantly documenting, updating, replying, and reacting.
Instead of greater clarity, employees face:
- endless message threads,
- constant alerts and pings,
- sprawling project-management boards,
- duplicative communication across platforms,
- and a culture of “instant responsiveness.”
Butterfield emphasizes that the tools themselves are not the problem—it is how organizations misuse them. When communication replaces action, documentation replaces execution, and availability replaces effectiveness, digital tools become amplifiers for fake work.
The Real Cost: Creativity and Innovation Are Being Eroded
The most damaging consequence of fake work is not inefficiency—it is the erosion of cognitive bandwidth for high-value work.
Butterfield warns that when employees spend the majority of their time:
- preparing talking points,
- aligning narratives,
- generating documentation,
- or attending meetings they do not need,
they lose the opportunity to engage in:
- deep thinking,
- innovative problem-solving,
- long-term planning,
- and creative exploration.
Real work requires uninterrupted focus, psychological safety, and intellectual space—conditions that are growing increasingly rare in modern office life.
Why Leaders Fall Into the Trap Too
Executives often believe fake work is something that happens below them. But Butterfield argues that CEOs can be some of the biggest contributors to unproductive work cultures.
Leaders inadvertently create fake work when they:
- demand overly polished presentations,
- use meetings as performance stages,
- expect real-time updates on every issue,
- reward “busy work” over thoughtful impact,
- or create layers of approval bottlenecks.
In many organizations, employees prepare slide decks not because the CEO needs them—but because they fear the consequences of showing up without them.
This creates a culture where optics matter more than outcomes.
The AI Question: Will Artificial Intelligence Fix Fake Work or Multiply It?
Butterfield sees AI as both an opportunity and a risk. AI could dramatically reduce fake work by:
- auto-generating slide decks,
- summarizing meetings,
- drafting documents,
- detecting duplicative workflows,
- streamlining communication,
- and enabling smarter prioritization.
But AI could also amplify fake work if companies use it to produce even more documentation, more reports, more slides, and more low-value tasks at higher speed.
“The danger,” Butterfield warns, “is that we automate inefficiency instead of eliminating it.”
A New Path Forward: Rediscovering Real Productivity
Butterfield argues that the antidote to fake work is not better tools, but better organizational habits.
Key shifts include:
- reducing meeting frequency and size,
- favoring direct conversation over presentation,
- empowering teams to make decisions without pre-alignment rituals,
- clarifying what ‘impact’ actually means,
- rewarding outcomes rather than documentation,
- and simplifying communication structures.
Companies must also reevaluate the default assumption that more communication equals better collaboration. In reality, the most productive teams often communicate less—but with more clarity.
Conclusion: The Future of Work Depends on Distinguishing Activity From Impact
Stewart Butterfield’s critique resonates because it cuts to the core of a paradox within modern work culture. Companies have never had more tools to boost productivity, yet many workers feel less productive than ever. Meetings, slides, pre-meetings, messaging threads, dashboards, and documentation create an unending cycle of activity that looks like work but doesn’t feel like it.
The challenge for leaders is not to eliminate structure or communication—it is to ensure that these structures do not overshadow genuine progress.
As Butterfield makes clear, the most valuable work is often invisible: thinking, planning, creating, deciding. And unless companies consciously dismantle the systems that incentivize fake work, they risk losing the very innovation and clarity they claim to pursue.
The future of work belongs not to those who can produce the most slides, but to those who can produce the most impact.
