Do Your Coworkers Think You're Pulling Your Weight?

A teammate asks for the numbers on Monday and you say Wednesday. Thursday, a message in the thread asks where they are.

Adam Bryant, who managed reporters at Newsweek and the New York Times and now helps run the ExCo Group, an executive mentoring firm, wrote in strategy+business that follow-through sets the best team players apart. Some reporters he never had to think about again; others' to-do lists ended up on his own. Andre Durand, CEO of Ping Identity, told him trust is a one-to-one ratio between what a person says and what they do, judged over time.

How often has someone had to chase you lately? A heavy load raises it with nobody slacking. Saying early that a date will slip keeps it down.

Your bag is on your chair before the first meeting, and a coworker walking by notices. Nobody asks what you're doing.

Researchers Elsbach, Cable and Sherman, in a 2010 paper in Human Relations, interviewed professional office workers and then ran an experiment. Being seen at work in normal hours led observers to think of someone as dependable; being seen early or late, as committed. The experiment suggested observers make these judgments without meaning to.

Elsbach and Cable warn this may cost remote workers raises and promotions even when they work just as hard. If your work happens out of sight, who actually sees you doing it? That is all they have to go on, and it measures nothing about your output.

Ask everyone on a team what share of the work they carry and add the answers. In groups researchers have tested, the total comes out above the whole.

Ross and Sicoly, in a 1979 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, had married couples in student housing estimate each spouse's part in household jobs; most couples together claimed more than the total. Their explanation was memory: your own efforts come to mind first. Schroeder, Caruso and Epley reported in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied in 2016 that overclaiming grew with group size among academic co-authors and MBA study groups.

Neither studied everyday workplace teams; both measured perceived share. A colleague sure they do more than you may be running partly on memory. So may you.

A manager asks who can take the meeting notes. The room goes still until one hand goes up.

In a 2017 American Economic Review paper, Babcock, Recalde, Vesterlund and Weingart looked at tasks everyone would rather someone else did. Women, more than men, volunteered for them, were asked to, and said yes when asked, partly because others expected them to say yes.

The study tracks who ends up with these jobs, not how teammates rate anyone. Think back over the last few thankless ones and who took them. If it was always you, you may be giving more than you're credited for, and it's fair to say when it's someone else's turn.

A message sits unanswered until the next afternoon, and someone in another chat asks where you are.

Alison Green, who writes Ask a Manager and The Cut's Ask a Boss column, answered a reader whose colleague replied hours or days late and skipped meetings; other coworkers had started asking where he was. Green's caveat: a health problem, a family crisis or a formal accommodation might be behind it, and coworkers don't always see those.

In your recent threads, how long do your replies take compared with what people need, and does anyone now message someone else first? Slow answers during deep work or on a different shift are normal. A one-line got it, will have it Thursday covers most of it.

The next shift opens the shared fridge and finds whatever you left in it.

Kiyong (Eric) Lee, a restaurant operations executive who has run a dozen or more new restaurant openings, watches how cooks clean as they go during a paid working trial. He writes on his site: "The ones who leave a mess in front of them will leave the same mess on your line."

That is one operator's hiring rule for kitchens, not a measured result for offices. Your version is the pile left for tomorrow or the doc with no notes. When someone takes over from you, can they start right away, or do they reset first?

A project lands in the team channel already finished, and it's the first you've heard of it. Questions that used to come to you now go two desks over.

What coworkers ask you for is a vote on who will see a job through, and you can read the count in your own inbox and calendar: who gets looped in, who gets the invite.

The read is muddy. A different shift, or sitting outside that project's lane, explains plenty of it. A full inbox cuts both ways too: being asked for everything can mean people see you as reliable, or as someone with time to spare.

None of this measures how hard you work. The studies tracked impressions, several used students or couples, and the main overclaiming study dates from 1979.

The bias runs in your coworkers too. Ross and Sicoly called the couples' overestimation relatively small, though it ran one way: no household job showed couples significantly underrating themselves. Schroeder's team found it shrank when group members thought explicitly about what the others had done.

One miss doesn't make a ratio; Durand talks about a pattern seen over time. Bryant's fix is a plain habit: note what you promised and when it's due. He says you won't catch everything, but it is easy to set yourself apart.