Urvashi, Urvashi, take it easy policy

If being competitive is a human trait, so is being lax. And now there is scientific proof that humans are hardwired to take it easy – if someone is ready to pitch in a bit more, or if they think that person to do so. Researchers at the Technical University of Berlin have found ‘social loafing‘, the tendency for individuals to expend less effort when working collectively rather than individually, to be standard behaviour in offices. So, all ye happy HR folks poking people back to offices thinking you’ve got a lovely Roman galley going, HR back after reading this.

Realising that ‘hanging out’ amounts to loss of work time doesn’t require a PhD. But here’s the surprise: it turns out that employees act the same lax way when working with their robot colleagues. The researchers tested their hypothesis by asking a cohort of workers to check the quality of a series of tasks, half of whom were told the tasks had been performed by AI. When the error rates of participants were examined, those working with AI were found to have caught fewer defects, after they figured robots can flag errors better. So, if your company is planning to inundate the workfloor with AI, remember that this means chances become much higher of your human employees ‘taking it easy’. Not that one needs robots to bring out the social loafers out of the office woodwork.