Scraping the remains of a lukewarm tuna melt off a communal plate, Susan realizes she hasn’t looked at her own spreadsheet in 37 minutes. The meeting ended with the usual flurry of activity-people snapping laptops shut, the audible click of expensive pens, the collective exhale of people who are paid to think, not to tidy. Then came the phrase that acts as a tether: ‘Susan, can you just capture the notes and send them around?’ It wasn’t a question of her capability as a Lead Analyst; it was a reflex of the room. She was an active participant in the 47-minute strategy session, contributing three of the most viable pivot ideas, yet here she is, the designated scribe, the rememberer of deadlines, the emotional custodian of the group’s messy brainstorming.

The Industrial Scale of Emotional Labor

Being the ‘office mom’ isn’t a title anyone applies for, yet it’s a role filled with 107 micro-responsibilities that never appear on a job description. It’s the birthday cards that need 7 signatures by noon. It’s the realization that the milk in the fridge is 17 days past its prime and the unspoken understanding that if you don’t throw it out, the entire breakroom will smell like a locker room by Friday. This is emotional labor in its most industrial form-the invisible, uncompensated work of maintaining the social and physical fabric of a workplace. While the ‘visionaries’ are allowed to leave their coffee cups on the table and retreat to their high-level thinking, the Susans of the world are left to deal with the residue. It is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from being the only person in the room who notices the thermostat is set to 67 degrees and everyone else is shivering, yet being the one who feels it is ‘too much’ to ask for a change without apologizing first.

I experienced a version of this recently when I spent 27 minutes-actually closer to 37 if you count the lingering awkwardness at the door-trying to end a conversation politely with a colleague who didn’t seem to realize I was holding a heavy box and staring at the elevator. I didn’t want to be ‘rude.’ I didn’t want to break the social harmony. That desire to keep the peace, to keep the wheels greased, is exactly what keeps people trapped in these roles. We prioritize the comfort of the collective over our own productivity, and then we wonder why our own 177-item to-do lists never seem to shrink.

Exploitation Disguised as ‘Soft Skills’

This isn’t just about being ‘nice.’ It’s a structural exploitation of empathy. When we ask the same person to organize the holiday party, we are telling her that her time is less valuable than the ‘real’ work. We are saying that her ability to navigate the complex social dynamics of getting 47 people to agree on a pizza topping is a ‘soft skill’ that doesn’t belong in a performance review, even though that same skill prevents the department from imploding.

The snack-bringing *is* a form of leadership; it’s the maintenance of morale. But because it looks like domesticity, it is treated as a hobby. There is a profound disconnect between what we value in theory and what we reward in practice. We talk about ‘synergy’ and ‘cohesion’ as if they are magical gases that just fill a room, rather than products manufactured by someone’s sweat and memory. It’s about the 17 emails sent to coordinate a single 10-minute cake-cutting ceremony.

Much like how

LipoLess focuses on the internal balance and wellness that eventually reflects on the outside, a company’s external success is often a direct result of how well the internal, ‘invisible’ work is being handled. If you neglect the internal systems, the external facade eventually crumbles under the weight of its own inefficiency. You cannot have a high-performing team if the people responsible for the ‘glue’ are too burned out to hold the pieces together.

The Cost of Perpetual Maintenance

I once tried to track these tasks for a week. I found that I spent 127 minutes on things that were strictly ‘social maintenance.’ That’s over two hours of high-concentration time lost to the ether. When I brought this up to a mentor, they told me I should just ‘stop doing it.’ But that’s the trap. If Susan stops taking the notes, the project stalls. The office mom doesn’t do these things because she loves them; she does them because she is the only one who realizes that if she doesn’t, the ship hits an iceberg of its own incompetence. It’s a hostage situation where the ransom is the office’s functionality.

We need to stop calling these ‘soft skills’ and start calling them ‘operational maintenance.’ We need to rotate the ‘mom’ duties among every member of the team. If the CEO had to clean the communal microwave for 7 minutes every morning, it would be replaced within 17 days.

The Physical and Chemical Burden

Victor H.L. found VOC levels highest in the office manager’s cubicle, not due to furniture, but because she was the literal repository for all the office’s physical baggage-markers, supplies, everything. That’s the emotional reality too. When you are the one people vent to, you are absorbing their stress. You are the human charcoal filter.

We are losing the innovation of the people who are too busy ordering lunch to think about the next big project. We are creating a hierarchy where ‘not caring’ is a prerequisite for moving up.