| Gretchen Gavett, Managing Editor, HBR.org | September 29, 2025 |
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A quick update before we dig in: You’ll now receive The Insider on Mondays. I’m excited to start the week with you!
As more and more people use gen AI on the job, a new phenomenon is emerging: what researchers at BetterUp Labs and Stanford call “workslop.”
Defined as “AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task,” workslop typically shows up as “low-effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work.” So, for example, you might receive what seems like a polished presentation, but upon further inspection, it’s full of errors and nonsensical phrases derived from AI. As a result, you have to decide whether to go back to the sender with your concerns—or just redo it yourself.
Either way, the burden is now on you—and that comes with a cost. The researchers surveyed 1,150 people across industries, and these workers reported spending close to two hours on average dealing with each instance of workslop they received, with 53% expressing annoyance, 38% confusion, and 22% feeling offended. They also viewed their colleagues as less creative, capable, reliable, trustworthy, or intelligent, to varying degrees. |
How can your company avoid this “workslop tax”? The authors offer three suggestions: |
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Use AI selectively and intentionally.
- Cultivate a “pilot” instead of a “passenger” mindset among employees: “Pilots are much more likely to use AI to enhance their own creativity, for example, than passengers. Passengers, in turn, are much more likely to use AI in order to avoid doing work than pilots.”
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Understand and adapt to the new complexities of gen AI-related collaboration.
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(The researchers’ survey is ongoing, so if you want to share your own experiences with workslop, you can do so here.) |
We all know the type: the CEO who gets financial results and is backed by the board, but whose impatient and intolerant leadership style slowly drains talent, saps innovation, and reduces psychological safety. How can you navigate this dynamic to keep your team on track—and even create small changes that can result in better performance over time?
Executive coaches Jenny Fernandez and Kathryn Landis recommend five strategies: |
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Raise concerns using the SCR method, which frames a problem as a situation, a challenge, and a resolution. This allows you to stay concise and strategic when managing up to the CEO.
- Build explicit agreements with executive peers about decision rights, which can tamp down the ambiguity and organizational whiplash a chaos CEO can create.
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Use external voices to bolster your case, including quotes and feedback from customers or investors the CEO values.
- Form a coalition with peers; it’s harder to ignore a united leadership team.
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Be patient. Change doesn’t happen overnight, and small wins matter. Focus on understanding what you can do today, what you can do this quarter, and what you can do this year.
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A Costco Cofounder’s Guiding Convictions |
How can a founder embed their values so deeply into a company that they endure over the long term? MIT’s Zeynep Ton, who has studied leaders of frontline services businesses for years as a part of her “good jobs strategy” research, recently sought to answer this question by looking at the legacy of one person in particular: Costco’s Jim Sinegal. Even after the cofounder’s retirement in 2012, the company has continued to succeed financially while also navigating tricky dilemmas that could have sunk other retailers.
Ton finds that five key convictions, derived from Costco’s Code of Ethics, made the difference: |
- Don’t blindly imitate others.
- Discipline sustains advantage.
- The shop floor is where money is made.
- Ninety percent of a manager’s job is teaching.
- Always do the right thing (because everyone is watching).
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“While Sinegal’s convictions themselves offer lessons for business leaders, perhaps more important is how he embedded them,” writes Ton. “He didn’t rely on big mission or vision statements. Instead, he institutionalized his values through a clear customer value proposition, rigid rules, memorable stories, relentless teaching, a consistent policy of promoting from within, and his own personal example.” |
Happiness, Delivered to Your Inbox |
I wanted to let you know that a six-week newsletter from Harvard Business School’s Arthur C. Brooks— “The Leader’s Happiness Reset”—launched this week. It includes curated excerpts from his new book, The Happiness Files, along with fresh insights and guidance on how to improve your happiness—and the happiness of your team. If you’d like to receive the newsletter over the next six weeks, you can sign up here.
And a reminder that, if you’re in the Boston-area, there are still tickets available to attend a live taping of our IdeaCast podcast with Brooks on Monday, October 6, at HBS. Get more info here. |
Thanks for reading! And take good care of yourself and others! (See what I did there?)
Gretchen |
Thanks to Holly Bauer, Erica Truxler, and Maureen Hoch for editing this newsletter. |
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Most popular with subscribers this week: |
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Learn to navigate these five tensions. |
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Don’t make high-stakes decisions without a clear moral compass. |
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Harvard Business School’s Leslie John and Alison Wood Brooks on how curiosity, listening, and phrasing can strengthen trust and improve decisions. |
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The composition of the executive team is an often-overlooked factor in a company’s success—or failure. |
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New research finds that chasing multiple dreams doesn’t have to mean choosing between them. |
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.png "A bar chart depicts that respondents’ perceptions of colleagues were generally lower after receiving low-effort, AI-generated work, rated across five traits: creativity, capability, reliability, trustworthiness, and intelligence. For each trait, participants responded, “I saw them as,” either Less, the same, or more of the trait. No more than 14 percent of respondents perceived the colleague who submitted workslop as “more” creative, capable, reliable, trustworthy, or intelligent. Overall, participants responded that they saw their colleague as either less or the same of the given trait. Those who rated the colleague as “less” of each trait ranged from 37% finding the colleague to be less intelligent, to 54% finding the colleague to be less creative. Likewise, respondents who thought “the same” of the colleague across all traits ranged from 36% whose opinions were unchanged about the colleague’s creativity, to 53% unchanged about the colleague’s intelligence. Source: Kate Niederhoffer et al.")
