An anti-worksop workshop to save your employees from chaos created by AI and time to waste

The official description of Workslop, according to researchers from the Social Media Laboratory of Stanford and Betterup, an online coaching platform, is “a work content generated by AI which emerges from a good job, but does not have the substance to significantly advance a given task”.

But, let’s be honest, most office employees will not need a definition. We have all encountered examples of work work in the wild. It is the memo stuck with stifling words as “underlining” and “laudable” which lets you scratch your head, or the ratio strewn with Em-Dash which, with a narrow reading, seems hollow.

It is one thing to obtain an email marketing or a request created from an AIC of a supplier; It is another to get one of your colleague or your boss. We used to complain about meetings that could have been an email; Now we receive confusing worksop e-mails that require meetings to be decoded. The managers who shared workslop horror stories with the Stanford and Betterup team also described the overhaul of the project of a direct report or returning it for strong revisions.

Thus, while companies can spend hundreds of millions on AI software to create efficiency and stimulate productivity, and encourage employees to use it generously, they can also inject friction into their operations.

After examining full -time employees in 1,150 companies, the researchers found that Workslop flows in all directions within companies. Most of the time, it spreads laterally between peers, but managers also send soils to their reports, and employees deposit it to their bosses. In total, 40% of respondents said they had a specimen that they would define as a workslop during the last month of a colleague.

An anti-working workshop

Does this mean that companies should reduce AI? Probably not. In a competitive market, it is difficult to ignore a technology that even study authors say “can positively transform certain aspects of work”. What companies can do, however, is to set up railings. They can even consider building an anti-workpop workshop for employees. Here’s what it might include:

• Develop the literacy of AI. Employees must deal with the production of AI as that of an unleashed trainee, inclined to fill factual and stylistic errors, explains Thor Ernstsson, CEO of ActicBlue.ai, a consulting company specializing in the prototyping of the use of AI and has worked with dozens of Fortune 500 companies. The employees must know the oddities and the limits of the tools they use. What data can it manage? Is it subject to hallucinations? “People do not understand this simply because AI seems authoritarian, it is not necessarily correct,” explains Ernstsson.

• Being precise on the moment when AI is appropriate. “When organizational leaders argue all the time for AI everywhere, they model a lack of discernment in the way of applying technology,” write the authors of the study. “It is easy to see how it translates into copying and coloring employees without thinking about AI answers in documents, even when AI is not suitable for work at hand.”

• Use AI to polish the work, not create it. Training employees to use AI as a partner or thought coach, explains Ernstsson. Workers can write a project of a report or memo, ensuring that it contains all the relevant information and context, before turning to an AI agent for advice and suggestions.

• Communication lessons. There is a reason why some people now maintain that today’s communications majors can be the leaders of tomorrow. In the AI ​​era, it is more important than ever that employees understand and practice how to clearly communicate a person before even thinking about the use of AI.

By the way, you would better plan your anti-worklop workshop soon. Researchers say that the “lazy” work generated by AI does not only slow people, which also leads employees to lose respect. After receiving Workslop, staff members said they considered peers behind it as less creative and less trustworthy.