An employee’s attempt to automate a time-consuming workplace task ended up increasing their workload, highlighting a growing workplace dilemma around productivity, automation and how efficiency gains are treated by employers.
In an anonymous Reddit post, the employee said weekly reporting had been taking around 15 hours of manual work. They spent a weekend developing a script that automated the data collection and formatting process, bringing the task down to less than a minute.
The employee initially used the time saved to learn new skills and manage their workload with less stress. They later decided to demonstrate the automation to their manager, hoping the initiative could help support a case for a promotion or salary increase.
Instead, the automated process became the new baseline for the task. The employee said they were subsequently given part of the workload of a senior colleague who had left the organisation, along with additional requests to automate similar tasks for other employees.
According to the post, the change took the employee from a manageable workload to working around 50 hours a week without a corresponding increase in pay.
The experience also prompted the employee to change how they approached workplace automation. Rather than openly highlighting every efficiency improvement, they said they had begun using automation primarily to manage their own workload while maintaining a more conventional pace of delivery.
The post, which received more than 3,000 upvotes, triggered discussion among professionals online about how organisations measure productivity and whether employees who find ways to complete tasks faster risk simply being assigned more work.
The incident reflects a broader challenge emerging as automation becomes more accessible in workplaces. Productivity tools can reduce the time required for repetitive tasks, but without corresponding changes to workloads, performance expectations, job design or compensation, efficiency gains can potentially translate into higher output expectations for the same role.
For employees, the episode also highlights the distinction between improving personal efficiency and formally changing the productivity benchmark for a job. As automation becomes increasingly embedded in corporate work, how organisations distribute the time and capacity created by such tools could become an important part of workplace productivity discussions.
