Research scientists have just issued a warning, of sorts, about a stealthy new threat to productivity across corporate America: Employees are creating and sharing time-wasting and reckless “workslop.”
It’s one thing to get a clumsy AI-created marketing email or solicitation from a vendor; it’s another to get one from your colleague or boss. Managers who shared workslop horror stories with the Stanford and BetterUp team described redoing a direct report’s project or sending it back for heavy revisions, while others spent time worrying about how to tell colleagues that their work was subpar.
Jeffrey Hancock, a professor of communication at Stanford University and founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, shared an example of the feedback the researchers heard: “Receiving this poor quality work created a huge time waste and inconvenience for me,” one project manager said of some workslop. “Since it was provided by my supervisor, I felt uncomfortable confronting her about its poor quality and requesting she redo it. So instead, I had to take on effort to do something that should have been her responsibility, which got in the way of my other ongoing projects.”
A benefits manager said of one AI-sourced document a colleague sent her, “It was annoying and frustrating to waste time trying to sort out something that should have been very straightforward.”
After surveying full-time employees at 1,150 companies, the researchers found that workslop is flowing in all directions inside firms. Mostly it spreads laterally between peers, but managers are also sending slop to their reports, and employees are filing it to their bosses. In total, 40% of respondents said they had received a specimen they’d define as workslop in the past month from a colleague.
Does this mean companies should cut back on AI? Probably not. In a competitive marketplace, it’s hard to ignore a technology that even the study authors say “can positively transform some aspects of work.” What companies can do, however, is set up guardrails. They may even consider building an anti-workslop workshop for employees. Here’s what it might include:
By the way, you’d better schedule your anti-workslop workshop soon. The researchers say that “lazy” AI-generated work is not only slowing people down, it’s also leading to employees losing respect for each other. After receiving workslop, staffers said they saw the peers behind it as less creative and less trustworthy.
This story has been updated to include comments from Stanford University professor Jeffrey Hancock.
