My manager wants us “more visible” on Slack, so now everyone is just pretending to work louder

I’ve been fully remote for a little over 2 years at a mid sized software company. Nothing glamorous, I do customer operations stuff, mostly tickets, data checks, weird little account issues, and chasing people for answers. Our team has been pretty solid. Work gets done, response times are fine, nobody is disappearing for 5 hours without saying anything. At least I thought so.

A few weeks ago my manager said leadership was worried remote employees were becoming “less visible.” Not less productive, just less visible. So now we’re supposed to post more updates in Slack during the day. Not a formal status report, because apparently that sounds too annoying, but “organic visibility.” Which somehow means saying things like “jumping into the export issue now” or “circling back on the vendor file” in a channel where nobody replies because we are all doing the exact same fake performance.

The funny part is it has made me work worse. Before, I would put on music, knock out a batch of tickets, take notes, then message someone if I actually needed them. Now I keep stopping to think, “Have I looked active enough in the last hour?” Yesterday I literally wrote “checking the billing mismatch on account 4812” and then immediately realized I had not actually opened the file yet. I was narrating the job before doing the job.

There’s also this unspoken thing where if someone posts at 8:03, another person posts at 8:05, and then suddenly half the team is online saying good morning like we’re all clocking into a group chat factory. One coworker started reacting with thumbs up to every update, and now that looks like a new expectation too. It’s so dumb but you can feel everyone adapting because nobody wants to be the “quiet” remote worker.

I don’t hate my job, and I’m grateful to work from home. My laundry gets done, my dog is happier, and I’m not wasting part of my life in traffic. But this stuff makes remote work feel like office culture found a way to follow us home and sit in the corner watching Slack.