Employees were found to be generating ‘low-effort, passable looking work’ that simply increased the workload for other employees.
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in workplaces is resulting in lower productivity due to employees using them to create substandard output, according to a Sept. 22 analysis published in the Harvard Business Review.
“A confusing contradiction is unfolding in companies embracing generative AI tools: while workers are largely following mandates to embrace the technology, few are seeing it create real value,” the report said.
The analysis, conducted by researchers from Stanford Social Media Lab and behavioral research lab BetterUp, identified a possible reason why this was happening.
Employees were using the AI tools to create “low-effort, passable looking work” that ended up generating more work for other employees.
Researchers term such content “workslop” defined as “AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.”
The “insidious effect” of workslop is that the receiver of such content is burdened with interpreting, correcting, and redoing the work, according to the report.
In a survey of 1,150 U.S.-based full-time employees conducted by researchers, 40 percent said they had received inferior quality work in the past month.
“The phenomenon occurs mostly between peers (40 percent), but workslop is also sent to managers by direct reports (18 percent),” it said.
“Sixteen percent of the time workslop flows down the ladder, from managers to their teams, or even from higher up than that. Workslop occurs across industries, but we found that professional services and technology are disproportionately impacted.”
Employees in the survey said they had to spend one hour and 56 minutes on average to deal with a single instance of workslop.
Researchers calculated that unsatisfactory work results in an “invisible tax” of $186 per month, which for an organization with 10,000 workers translates into more than $9 million in lost productivity annually, it said.
“When we asked participants in our study how it feels to receive workslop, 53 percent report being annoyed, 38 percent confused, and 22 percent offended,” the report states.
“Approximately half of the people we surveyed viewed colleagues who sent workslop as less creative, capable, and reliable than they did before receiving the output. Forty-two percent saw them as less trustworthy, and 37 percent saw that colleague as less intelligent.”
