In times of labor shortage, why are employees still doing stupid work?

A recent Japan Times article introduced me to the term "rust-out." As a European, I immediately recognized the concept, although we usually call it "boreout."

Most of us are familiar with burnout. It's the result of too much work, too much pressure, and too little time to recover. Rust-out comes from the opposite direction. It happens when people are not sufficiently challenged, when their skills are underutilized, and when they spend their days completing tasks that fail to engage them or make use of their capabilities.

What makes rust-out particularly dangerous is that it is often invisible. People still show up. The work still gets done. Performance may even look acceptable on paper. Yet over time, curiosity fades, initiative declines, and talented employees disengage. Not because they are overwhelmed, but because they no longer feel they are contributing in a meaningful way.

Reading the article, I couldn't help thinking about Japan's labor shortage.

Copyright PR Times/Family Mart

Almost every conversation about the future of work in Japan eventually circles back to demographics. Companies struggle to hire. Entire industries face staffing shortages. Policymakers worry about the impact of a shrinking workforce. The underlying assumption is often that Japan needs more workers.

But perhaps part of the challenge is that organizations are not fully utilizing the workers they already have.

Over the years, I have met highly capable professionals in Japan with deep expertise, strong customer relationships, international experience, and valuable ideas. Yet many spend a significant portion of their day compiling reports, updating spreadsheets, searching for information, reformatting documents, or manually moving data from one system to another. The work needs to be done, but it often bears little relationship to the skills for which these people were originally hired.

This is where I think the AI conversation becomes far more interesting than the usual headlines about replacing jobs.

At Japan Consulting Office, much of our work revolves around helping Japanese and global organizations improve communication, collaboration, and productivity across cultures. Increasingly, AI is becoming part of those conversations. What I hear from clients is rarely a desire to replace people. What they want is to remove friction. They want employees spending less time on administrative work and more time on work that creates value. That distinction matters.

For a country facing chronic labor shortages, the real opportunity may not be workforce reduction. It may be workforce amplification.

If AI can summarize meetings, draft documents, find information faster, automate repetitive processes, and handle routine administrative tasks, employees can focus on activities that require judgment, creativity, relationship building, and problem solving. In other words, the work that humans are uniquely equipped to do. Viewed through that lens, AI is not simply a productivity tool. It is a potential antidote to rust-out.

The goal should not be to help people work faster at tasks they dislike. The goal should be to eliminate as many low-value tasks as possible so people can spend more time applying their experience, expertise, and creativity.

That feels especially important in Japan. When talent is becoming increasingly scarce, organizations can no longer afford to have skilled employees spending their days on work that neither challenges them nor contributes meaningfully to business outcomes.

Burnout comes from asking too much of people.

Rust-out comes from asking too little of their abilities.

As Japanese organizations continue to navigate labor shortages, demographic change, and AI adoption, perhaps the question is not simply how to find more workers.

Perhaps it is how to ensure that the workers you already have are able to spend more of their time doing work that matters. That may be one of the most important challenges, and opportunities, facing Japanese businesses today.

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