In many organisations, ‘busyness’ has become a rewarded optic. The irony is that this was always going to eventualise. With leaders and managers’ own busyness, they seek shortcuts, signs and indicators to quickly tick off items and move on to the next task, strategy, or problem. For your employee, it looks like this:

• Endless meetings
• Constantly looking harried and under pressure
• The wave as you walk past of, ‘just getting to it’

Coasters create mist.  They can describe activity beautifully. But outcomes? Not so much.

At the start, team members are happy to chip in. It’s teamwork after all. Until it becomes a permanent expectation to cover the gaps and is built into everyone’s responsibilities:

• Rewriting emails before they go out
• Reassurance to clients after a less- than- satisfactory result by their coaster colleague
• Building buffer times for expected missed deadlines

It’s hard to notice immediately, because the work still gets done. But it is done due to someone else. When your best people ask, ‘Why am I carrying this person?’, a serious culture problem is in play.  Businesses carry coasters through the goodwill of better employees.

They understand how to ‘look’ valuable and are skilled at appeasing. It’s why it can be hard to detect and delicate to manage. They know exactly how to appear involved:

• Speaking confidently in meetings
• Visible to leaders, keeping them informed and reassured
• Attaching themselves to successful projects and high performers

But after the meeting, nothing happens. Coasters can remain in businesses for years because perception is easier to measure than substance.

Not in the beginning. Complexity might be the first play card in masking the inertia. But if the call out feels a bit too real, ‘Where is this up to?’; ‘Why wasn’t this done?’; the conversation becomes emotional:

• ‘I feel like I’m being singled out’
• ‘I’ve just had a lot going on lately’
• ‘I thought I was doing the right thing’

Genuine support and empathy matter in any healthy workplace. However, chronic coasters learn that appearing overwhelmed, misunderstood, or emotionally affected can delay accountability long enough for the pressure to move elsewhere. However, accountability is adulthood at work and where some businesses get nervous. They confuse kindness with avoidance. They don’t want to upset the person. Instead, they upset the team.

Of all the signs, this might have the deepest impact on a business.  A coaster often doesn’t ask better questions. They don’t improve the process. They don’t bring new ideas. They don’t notice what is changing around them. They are still doing the job as it existed 3 years ago, while the business has moved on. In today’s workplace, that is expensive. With AI, automation, client expectations, and cost pressure, businesses need people who are awake, switched on to noticing the client is frustrated, the process is broken, or the deadline is drifting. The opposite of coasting is not overwork. It is alertness.

The problem with coasters is not just that they do less. It’s that everyone else organises themselves around that person. Then, without meaning to, the business has created an unfairness that is visible to everyone. The team starts to think, ‘Okay, so that’s allowed here.’ That’s how culture changes inside a business. It’s not through value statements or leadership posters, but through small daily moments when people realise what the organisation, notices, what it ignores and who carries the weight.