From Invisible to Indispensable: The Power of Glue Work

Imagine that one of your most valuable team members is disappointed that their hard work is not being recognized with a promotion, annual bonus, or merit increase.

HR-approved career ladders define role expectations but often overlook the soft skills that make some employees invaluable. Unfortunately, these expectations do not include this invisible work that makes this specific team member so valuable.

You need to retain this person who has helped your team shift from dysfunction to efficiency, from conflict to respectful dialogue, and from unreliable to consistent delivery for your internal and external customers. You look for answers and find a term that perfectly describes their contributions: glue work.

Understanding Glue Work

Glue work, coined initially by Tanya Reilly, is a term used to describe the invisible work that helps teams and organizations run effectively and improve team cohesiveness and culture.

While vital to a team's success, most organizations have not identified how to measure and reward glue work. Inevitably, this disincentivizes many team members from participating in caring for this work, leaving it to be completed by individuals who have an intrinsic desire to help the individuals around them.

With the collaboration of incredible women, we’ve developed a solution to measure and reward this invisible work. It also encourages shared responsibility, ensuring this essential work isn’t left to a few.

Three Phases of Glue Work — Recognition | Responsibility | Reshaping

To address this, we must first understand the three pillars of glue work: caring about, caring for, and creating the collective.

Recognition: Caring About the Collective

The foundation of glue work is acknowledging that you and the people you work with are imperfect human beings (not machines) with wants, needs, and desires that may or may not be your own. Collectively, these are their interests.

It needs to be everyone's responsibility, from the most junior interns to the senior executives, to actively listen to better understand each team member’s interests and strive to understand the underlying reasons for them.

Responsibility: Caring for the Collective

Once you better understand your team members' interests, you are in a better position to help support your fellow team members. This support can take many shapes and forms, depending on your role and level of seniority.

Everyone on the team can be more thoughtful about how they communicate with others by doing things as simple as making sure that all language is easily understandable by others.

Mid-level team members can raise their hand when a bit of orphaned work needs to be cared for or ensure that all team members have a chance to speak and be heard.

Senior team members can take things one step further and skillfully intercept or mitigate behaviors that are against the interests of one or more team members.

Reshaping: Creating the Collective

While caring about and for the members of your organization is generally reactive, creating the collective allows you to get ahead of challenges by implementing and acting on proactive strategies.

This category of work is often the responsibility of people managers and more seasoned members of the team and can include:

• Designing and distributing (re)onboarding materials for current and new team members to ensure equal distribution of key information
• Ensuring a true meritocracy by taking steps to eliminate bias from hiring and promotion processes
• Providing teams with the education and support that enables all team members to thrive

Measuring & Rewarding Glue Work

With a clear understanding of the value of work and its categories, you are ready to implement a system that allows you to measure and reward team members for this work, which I call The Glue Work Framework. The tool's name might be long, but the implementation can be straightforward, thanks to some heavy lifting that my team and I have done for you.

The Glue Work Framework consists of a clearly defined set of expectations documented for all three pillars of glue work. These expectations have been mapped to the four basic career stages (early, mid, senior, and executive) and people managers.

This allows you to easily integrate these expectations into your existing career ladder for all organizational roles across all departments, functions, crafts, and skills. For example, have all of your team members taken on a piece of orphaned work this quarter?

Once everything is integrated and rolled out to your organization, you can measure each individual’s contribution (or lack thereof) with each performance review or promotion cycle, mitigating attrition risk for those performing the invisible work.

Accessing The Glue Work Framework

We now offer a free Starter Kit to help you explore the Glue Work Framework, as well as a Full Kit with everything you need to implement it across your organization. You can also hear more about the framework on Ep 04: Making the Invisible Work Count on our podcast, The Messy Middle Matters.

If you’re interested in a walkthrough or would like to explore a tailored engagement, please complete our interest form to initiate the conversation.

Recognizing and rewarding glue work isn’t just about fairness. It’s about sustaining healthy, high-functioning teams. When we acknowledge the invisible work that keeps organizations running smoothly, we create an environment where everyone’s contributions are valued. Expanding career ladders to include this work ensures that team members who foster collaboration and stability are supported rather than overlooked.

Whether you take small steps or adopt a structured approach like The Glue Work Framework, making this work count is a step toward building stronger, more resilient teams.