Woman reveals how she did no work for a 12 months and ‘nobody seen’

Software worker Leyla Kazim became convinced her role was pointless after restructuring and a change of management, so she carried out a workplace “experiment” by quietly doing almost nothing

View 3 Images

Before becoming a telly star, Leyla Kazim spent nearly a decade as a corporate worker in London, enjoying the early years before restructures and a change of management left her convinced her role was pointless.

So she decided to quietly stop working as an “experiment” to see how long it would take for anyone to notice – and no one did.

Kazim worked at a software firm and admitted the first few years as an employer “were genuinely good”.

She described her initial senior manager as a “great” man who would “challenge you, but also acknowledge when you did well”. While her work wasn’t life-changing, her manager was inspiring enough that Kazim felt her work job mattered.

Things took a turn when the manager left, and the company went “through various rounds of restructuring, that I developed a nagging suspicion that my role was irrelevant and futile”. As a result, Kazim ended up under a manager whose skills weren’t up to her expectations.

“I started to feel increasingly existential about the work I was doing,” Kazim said, according to the Telegraph. She continued: “The problem was that I suspected no one – my new manager included – really knew what my role was meant to entail.

“I looked at what I was doing day to day, hour to hour, and looked at what everyone else was doing, and it all started to feel like a convoluted farce.” At this point, Kazim came up with the idea to conduct the experiment.

She explained: “Out of protest, I resolved to stop working and to see how long it would be before anyone noticed. The results changed the way I would approach my career forever.” She continued: “I was strategic about how I would conduct my experiment.

“This was in the era before working from home, so I knew I’d have to go to my office each day and at least appear to be working. I quickly realised, though, that there is no greater ruse in a modern office than the spreadsheet.

“People walk past, see all that small text and columns, and just assume you’re working. What was I actually doing?

“Meticulously planning 10 months of travel: day-by-day itineraries, budgets, where we’d stay, what trains to get, things to see. My now-husband and I had always planned to travel; I was simply using company hours to prepare for it.

“Of course this involved a lot of Googling, so I always had a page that looked like work ready, so that I could minimise my travel research quickly. I’d angled my monitor, but I was lucky to be sat in front of a window, away from any footfall, so it was rare that anyone saw my screen.

“To leave a paper trail – so that if anyone asked, I could point to tasks I’d completed – I’d send a couple of emails during the week. I’d pad the basic questions about some account or other out with extra thoughts, so that it seemed like I’d considered the subject at length

“Sometimes I’d create a document based on whatever was exchanged in the email. Other times, I might even turn the email contents into a PowerPoint presentation.

“With about 15 minutes of effort, I would have earned my crust. If I hadn’t done even that, half an hour before my weekly one-to-ones with my manager I would spend 15 minutes knocking up a page of something, typically a presentation with figures I knew he wouldn’t bother to follow-up on.

“Then I’d deliver my updates in a convincing tone, using the appropriate buzz phrases. ‘I’m making great progress… the stakeholders are on board’

“My manager would nod: –’That all sounds great! Carry on’.”

Kazim added: “In that way, I did no work for an entire year. The experiment ended not because anyone exposed my idling, but because I finally left.

“I’d expected it to last a couple of weeks before someone would ask whether I’d actually done something. It lasted a year.

“My theory had been proven: my job was a farce, which meant a big portion of my life was too. Not being caught out didn’t feel like a relief – it just compounded the meaninglessness of it all.

“But it wasn’t an entirely wasted year, because the experiment taught me a valuable lesson about the nature of modern work. It’s a game.

“A theatre performance. Once you understand the core rule – that a performance of perceived effort matters more than actual output – everything changes.”

For the latest breaking news and stories from across the globe from the Daily Star, sign up for our newsletters.