Employees often have clarity of activity(ies) rather than clarity of outcome(s).
What do I mean by that? Well, when you ask an employee to talk about what they are working on, the response typically includes a list of activities (tasks), or the name of a project, or how many meetings they were in that day/week.
But how often are the discussions about the outcomes? The purpose? The meaning? The impact? The value?
Busyness has a way of hypnotizing the employees. They can become so focused on doing the thing, they sometimes lose focus of why?
Is the activity effective? How do you know? Is the activity efficient? How do you know? Is the activity contributing value? How do you know? Do you feel alignment between the activity and the outcome? If not, why not? Can activities be innovated, re-imagined, streamlined, improved, replaced? What are the metrics being used?
On top of it, busyness can be subjective whereas outcomes are objective.