We Need to Talk About Workslop
We've got a strong contender for word of the year: Workslop. Defined in this article by a research team at BetterUp Labs and the Stanford Social Media Lab, it refers to "AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task."
The article is well worth a full read. The pernicious thing about workslop is that, at first glance, it appears to be of high quality. A well-structured report, polished slides, etc. However, because it's not carefully reviewed and crafted, it actually creates more work for the other people in the organization, who now have to review and redo the sloppy work.
My own takeaways:
This is what you get when you vaguely demand that your employees use AI to boost productivity, without clear goals or measures on what that would entail.
It's also what you get when "visible activity" is valued above concrete outcomes—what Cal Newport calls pseudo-productivity. You reward people only for the number of emails they send? You'll get a whole lot of rapidly generated and ultimately useless emails.
Finally, the ease with which AI generates polished outputs can paper over processes that are inherently inefficient and shouldn't exist in the first place. Yes, thanks to AI you can rapidly generate all sorts of reports—if only at low quality—but is anyone even going to read them? (They'll probably read the AI-generated summary 😛)
What to do? As is often the case, the answer was there all along, made more acute by the generative AI revolution: empower people to own outcomes instead of outputs and hold them accountable for them. For example, don't ask for a report or presentation that compares different solution providers. Ask for a decision on which solution provider to pick. The person working on that task might ask AI to create an initial overview, but because they'll have to defend their choice, they won't just send it off to some poor coworker to sift through.
In short, don't just yell at your workers to stop generating AI workslop. Let them own the outcomes of what they create, and the problem will take care of itself.
