Someone on your team wakes up with a fever. They post in the company channel. A manager replies asking if they've logged it. Someone links the wrong policy. A second person corrects the first. HR — or whoever is pretending to be HR this quarter — asks them to fill in a form. The form is in a tool nobody can find. Twelve messages later, a person who is genuinely unwell has spent forty minutes coordinating their own absence.
Nothing was filed. Nothing was decided that couldn't have been decided in one line. But six people touched it.
This is HR theatre: activity that looks like people-ops but produces no filed outcome. And it has a price tag most founders never add up.
The tax you can't see on the invoice
The obvious cost is the time those six people spent. The real cost is what the interruption did to the rest of their day.
Gloria Mark's research at UC Irvine put a number on it: after a single interruption, it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to fully return to the original task. People rarely snap back — they detour through two other tasks first, and they report higher stress and time pressure when they finally do return. (gloriamark.com)
So that sick-day thread didn't cost forty minutes. It cost forty minutes of coordination, plus a 23-minute refocus tax on everyone it pulled in. For a six-person thread, you're closer to two and a half hours of real, billable attention — spent processing one fever.
Now multiply by every leave request, every "quick question about expenses," every onboarding where the new hire's laptop wasn't ordered because the checklist lived in someone's head.
Theatre is the rituals, not the work
People hear "anti-HR" and assume we mean anti-people. The opposite. The people work — pay, leave, contracts, the genuinely hard conversations — deserves more care, not less. What deserves the bin is the theatre wrapped around it:
- Engagement surveys that generate a slide and zero changed decisions.
- Retros about retros.
- A 47-page culture deck nobody reads twice.
- Values workshops that end with a poster and start with the same problems on Monday.
Here's the uncomfortable part. The theatre persists because it's visible. A workshop is something you can point to. Filed paperwork, a clean payroll run, an offboarding that didn't leak access — that's invisible when it works. So the performative stuff gets the budget, and the boring, load-bearing stuff gets done at 11pm by a founder who didn't sign up to be a benefits administrator.
The engagement industry is a useful tell here. Despite two decades of surveys, programmes, and "culture" spend, Gallup found global employee engagement sat at 21% in 2024 — and fell that year, one of only two declines in twelve years, with an estimated $438 billion in lost productivity. (Gallup) If the theatre worked, the numbers would have moved by now.
What "no theatre" actually looks like
Cutting theatre isn't cutting care. It's routing the work so it resolves instead of echoing.
One front door. Every people-ops request — leave, payroll change, a contract question — goes to one place, not a public channel where six bystanders feel obliged to weigh in. A request enters, gets categorised, gets owned, gets closed. The thread doesn't happen because there is no thread.
Async by default. A sick day is a notification, not a negotiation. "Out today, back tomorrow" should be one message that updates the system and ends. No approval ritual for the predictable.
Humans who file things. The point of an ops layer is that someone reads the contract, files with the right authority, and closes the loop — so the founder finds out it happened, not that it needs doing.
A weekly digest instead of a live feed. Most people-ops questions aren't urgent; they only feel urgent because they arrive in a channel that pings. Batch them. One digest a week beats forty interruptions.
Run the maths on your own team
Pick last month. Count the leave requests, the payroll edge cases, the onboarding scrambles, the "where do I find…" questions. For each one, estimate the people pulled in and add the 23-minute refocus tax per person.
Most founders who do this land somewhere between a half-day and two full days a week of senior attention — their own, usually — going to coordination that should have been one filed action.
That's the cost of theatre. It doesn't show up on an invoice, which is exactly why it never gets cut. Start counting it and the case for boring, filed, humans-in-the-loop ops makes itself.