Modern work increasingly requires people to look attentive rather than necessarily be attentive.
The distinction feels subtle at first, but once noticed, it becomes difficult to ignore. Meetings are now filled with small performances of participation: strategic nodding, occasional typing, notebook handling, thoughtful facial expressions calibrated carefully for video calls and the increasingly recognisable “I’m listening” posture that often signals little beyond operational presence.
Somewhere along the way, attention itself became part of the job description.
Hybrid working accelerated this shift. Before remote meetings, people could disappear more comfortably into physical conference rooms. Attention was harder to monitor and easier to fake collectively. Now, everyone occupies small illuminated squares where visibility itself becomes a form of participation.
The result is a new category of modern workplace behaviour: performative attentiveness.
You can see it everywhere:
- typing intermittently to imply engagement
- repeating the final sentence someone said in slightly different wording
- carefully timed “makes sense” responses
- maintaining eye contact with the webcam while mentally reorganising dinner plans
None of this necessarily reflects dishonesty. In many ways, it reflects adaptation. Modern work requires people to process extraordinary volumes of information while remaining socially functional and professionally available at almost all times.
The notebook itself has become symbolic. Not necessarily because useful notes are being captured, but because the presence of the notebook signals willingness, organisation and visible participation. Whether anything meaningful is written is increasingly secondary.
This creates an unusual contradiction:
many people are exhausted not from work itself, but from the continuous performance surrounding work.
Being “on” now extends beyond productivity. It includes responsiveness, attentiveness, emotional calibration and visual signals of engagement. Presence has become operational.
The modern worker is no longer simply completing tasks. They are continuously managing the appearance of involvement.
And perhaps that is why phrases like Engaged, Broadly feel familiar immediately. They acknowledge something most people recognise but rarely articulate directly:
sometimes participation is approximate.