Widespread hidden digital labour is having a negative impact on our workforce

Last month I released my 2026 research report, The Hidden Cost, which explores the nature and impact of hidden digital labour in the cultural sector.

What I’m calling ‘hidden work’ has several shared characteristics:

• It is necessary (not optional).
• It is structurally unaccounted for (not just occasionally missing from the plan).
• People don’t fully see or understand it (the work, or the effort behind it, doesn’t register with the people around it).

This report drew on the findings from 187 survey responses from culture sector professionals working at organisations of all scales in 15 different countries, alongside 15 in-depth interviews with digital practitioners.

I found the problem of hidden labour is widespread and shows up in some consistent and repeated forms of work. It is the result of a small number of structural issues that many cultural organisations share, and is having a notable negative impact on both the people who have to carry this workload and the organisations they work inside.

The most commonly reported hidden workload was between four-six hours per week (reported by 38% of respondents), although 27% of responses reported a higher hidden workload than this (with 5% of responses reporting a hidden workload of more than 15 hours a week).

I found that this hidden labour shows up as six distinct forms of work:

1. Reactive firefighting (urgent fixes and addressing ad hoc requests).
2. Maintenance (keeping things running, including workarounds).
3. Translation and coordination (working across teams, explaining what's involved, spotting dependencies).
4. Institutional memory (remembering why things are the way they are).
5. Capability absorption (taking on new responsibilities and teaching yourself new skills).
6. Legitimisation (explaining and justifying digital work to those who commission it).

The largest categories of work by volume were not technical; rather they were the relational labour required to work horizontally across organisations that are structured vertically.

The findings from this work emphasis the title of Sophie Frost's 2025 publication: Digital labour is emotional labour. And the impact of this work is felt acutely by the people who have to do it.

While 72% of the people I heard from said they find the work meaningful, 72% also said they feel worn out at the end of the working day; 58% said they feel emotionally drained; and 56% struggle to recover their energy between days.

Perhaps most damningly, 62% of the survey respondents had considered leaving their role in the last 12 months, and that intent to leave was highest amongst those with the largest hidden workloads.

The impact isn’t just on individuals, with 65% of responses noting that work outside their planned responsibilities had caused project delays in the last six months and 67% saying it had led to planned work being dropped or reduced.

Mind the gap

Part of the reason that so much of this work exists is an understanding gap between what leaders and organisations think digital work involves, and the reality of what the work is and requires.

Only 11% of respondents agreed their wider organisation understands what their role involves which echoes a finding from Kati Price and Daffyd James’ 2018 research into digital team structures in which they found just 9% of the 56 organisations surveyed agreed that digital was understood within their organisation.

It’s worth being clear that much of this is not new, and it has not gone undocumented.

The 2018 AHRC-funded One by One study of UK museums identified the leadership understanding gap as “especially problematic”, found that digital responsibilities had grown across roles without appearing in job descriptions, and quoted practitioners describing digital teams as “the last stop” for anything colleagues didn’t know where to put.

A 2024 review of digital culture across the UK cultural sectors, carried out by Susan Oman and commissioned by DCMS, found that support mechanisms tend to favour new initiatives while “prior digital investments are not systematically evaluated or tested at scale to enable good planning or the informed development of a digital infrastructure”. It also noted that funders and policymakers have consistently valued innovation over operations, which leads to the creation of hidden work.

What needs to change?

Much of what I describe in the final section of the report about what needs to change has been recommended in some form before. The second One by One report in 2019 made several of the same points – that responses had to be led by individual need rather than technology, that job descriptions and performance processes should be updated to reflect digital work, that change depends on the organisational conditions leaders create, and that practitioners need the standing and language to make the case upwards.

Those recommendations were made clearly and carefully to the sector seven years ago and, the evidence from my work suggests, mostly not acted on. That is not a criticism of that work; rather it points to the fact that the barrier is not (and perhaps has never been) a shortage of good recommendations, but the decision and ability to act on them.

The patterns that this research documents in 2026 are consistent with all of this earlier work. They have not been resolved in the intervening years but that is the predictable outcome of a system that has no structural incentive to resolve them, and a workforce that has absorbed the cost quietly enough that the urgency to address them has never quite been registered where the decisions are made.

I think that the time has come where that has to change, and this report is an attempt to provide the evidence to support that shift.

If you do this work, I hope the report has given you something solid and credible to point at. The exhaustion you feel at the end of the week, the sense that your job has somehow become three jobs, the suspicion that you are the only thing standing between a system and its failure – these are not signs that you are managing badly.

They are what these conditions produce, in almost everyone, almost everywhere. You did not create them, and you cannot be expected to fix them on your own.

And if you hold some authority over how digital work gets resourced, planned, or understood, my hope is different. Much of what this work describes is probably happening somewhere in your organisation, and a good deal of it is likely holding up something that you rely on without your being able to see it.

None of that is a failing on anyone’s part, it’s hard to resource or protect work you cannot see, which is why so much of the report is an attempt to help make that work visible. What happens next isn’t really a digital question. It is a matter of whether the work, once seen, is treated as something that warrants action.

Ash Mann is a consultant who supports cultural organisations to make the most of their digital activity. You can read the full report on his website.