What is workslop?

Workslop masquerades as meaningful, it may appear superficially polished, and yet requires others to interpret, fix, or even redo it.

It's a growing source of frustration in the workplace, social psychologist Dr Kate Niederhoffer told RNZ’s Afternoons.

She is vice president of Texas-based BetterUp Labs and co-authored a study on workslop when she started to hear anecdotal evidence of it. 

It is AI-generated content that appears to fulfill a goal, it can come in the form of documents, emails, reports or code, she says.

“It looks like it's really polished, but after a little bit of inspection, it's pretty clear that it doesn't exactly advance the task, and it actually pushes the burden of the work onto the recipient of the work.”

What’s insidious about workslop is that it not only shifts the cognitive burden to the recipient, she says, but that cognitive effort then becomes an emotional problem.

“You start to get frustrated, annoyed... just not really knowing why somebody is wasting your time providing this polished looking document that doesn't exactly advance the task forward.”

This in turn can cause friction between workers, she says.

“This interpersonal consequence, where we noticed we were judging people who were authoring this content, trusting them less, not wanting to work with them.”

Workslop misses the mark when it comes to knowing your audience, she says.

“It's a lack of immersing yourself in the work, so it's not just the shared content, but it's that natural human process where you attune to your audience and you try to figure out, what does this person know that's unique from me, that's shared with me?

“And then you create that dance in your head of providing the right information that they know and that you both know that takes into account context really well.”

She is positive about AI more generally, she says, the problem is more one of insidious interpersonal problems.

“We think this is an atrophy of the collaboration muscles that really make work happen.”

In her survey 53 percent of recipients self-reported generating workslop, she says.

“If 53 percent of people are admitting to this, then we know it's probably under-reported and probably more than people are willing to say.”

A deeper dive revealed people were using it to plough through work that felt overwhelming, she says.

“They're juggling too much at work right now. It's sort of a burnout-like sensation. And so, the mindset isn't so much like, ha ha, I'm doing this to trick someone who's receiving the work and I'm getting away with it.

“It's more like I don't have the energy to complete this task myself. And so, I'm relying on these tools as a shortcut to help me get by.”

She doesn’t believe workslop is indicative of a failure of the tool, however.

“It's really a breakdown of these deeply human skills and muscles that we have always needed and will still need.”

The survey revealed intense feelings from workers over this emerging workslop phenomenon, she says.

“They talk about betrayal, resentment, anger. In some cases, it's leading people to resign with very short notice.”

However with the right mindset she believes AI can boost productivity and creativity.

“When you have what we call a pilot mindset, when you're high in agency and optimism, then you tend to approach these tools in a discerning way.

“You're not overly reliant on them, but instead you're using them to augment the competencies that you already have.”