I’m sure you’ve seen this chart making the rounds. It was reposted constantly, drawing a lot of commentary about the high rate of performative work in Singapore. Yet it’s completely meaningless.
How is that possible?
Well, look at the description very closely. It claims to report a share of respondents who are reporting the following shares of productive and performative work. It’s reporting two shares with one number, which is an impossible feat.
Upon confirming this error with my fellow data analyst friends, I decided to delve further into the actual report. Oddly enough, I could not find the full report from Slack that described the methodology for this country data. Now, things got really interesting.
Statista, the source of this infographic, cited CNBC, who in turn cited Slack. In playing this game of repost telephone, some important context got lost in translation.
What CNBC actually quoted was this: “The survey found that employees from India (43%), Japan (37%) and Singapore (36%) reported spending more of their time on such work than the global average (32%).”
This makes two things clear:
1. It is share of employees that is reported in the infographic and not share of reported work.
2. Employees reporting performative work in Singapore doesn’t seem so high anymore, just 4% above the global average. The average which was not reflected in the chart. A better infographic would have a bar showing the average, and which countries fell below or above that.
The story seems very different now, doesn’t it? It gets even more different in a second.
The next inaccuracy is that 9 countries were surveyed, and yet only 8 bars are on the chart. Australia (29%) was left out completely. To have a good spread across regions, as it should be in a global study, Australia should be included.
The final inaccuracy is the definition of performative work. In the chart, they define performative work as appearing busy. However, in the CNBC article, 44% of Singapore employees “say their productivity has been affected by spending “too much time” in meetings and emails.” Meetings and emails aren’t quite the same as appearing busy to me since you’re actively roped into such work. Again, the original intent of the study has been lost.
So what’s the takeaway here?
Well as consumers of information, we need to be wary of infographics which may distort the meaning of the original research.
You can do this in the following ways:
1. Read the definitions in the infographic closely before looking at the data, to make sure the numbers are actually meaningful.
2. Always check the original cited source to gather the original meaning.
3. Read the methodology. How was this data collected? What questions were actually asked verbatim?
For reference, here is the original source of data for the infographic below: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/14/employees-in-asia-are-spending-the-most-time-looking-busy-at-work.html
Hope this helps you understand infographics better! Repost this if you found it helpful!
