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. We used to complain about meetings that could have been an email; now we receive confusing workslop emails that require meetings to be decoded. Managers who shared workslop horror stories with the Stanford and BetterUp team also described redoing a direct report’s project or sending it back for heavy revisions.
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.
