Why it’s time to learn ‘IT distancing’

Why it’s time to learn ‘IT distancing’

This week, Professor Monideepa Tarafdar from Lancaster University Management School writes for EAPA UK about the impact of remote working and the need to focus specifically on IT-related wellbeing support for employees.

Remote working was a novelty to many people at the start of the lockdown – but all predictions for post-pandemic life point to WFH becoming far more common as organisations of all shapes and sizes look to improve their resilience (and cut costs).

For employees, a working life based around remote technologies will bring more flexibility, more freedom, time, and the chance to have a better quality of life. It’ll also bring much greater risk of ‘technostress’.

Over the past decade we’ve been researching the phenomenon of the ‘dark side’ of IT. The past 30 years has seen dramatic spikes of change from technology: the replacement of job roles and routines in the 1990s and 2000s, followed by the stress created by the rush of technology: email overload, faster turnaround times, higher expectations, the need for constantly updated skills and knowledge. Employees have come to gain reassurance, stimulation and a sense of purpose from streams of new messages, information, surprises, mixing work with personal interests. These aspects find heightened and urgent existence in the context of the relentless current world pandemic.

Psychologically, we are social beings – perhaps we’re still cave people trying to live in a digital world. So the shift to WFH as a more regular ‘norm’ will come loaded with challenges to employee wellbeing. From our studies we’ve seen how technostress has been an issue for around 40% of the working population – and with far more people expected to use technology remotely (and forced to during lockdown), we’d expect this figure to rise to more like 80%.

WFH technostress, in particular, is caused by feelings of being invaded. That laptop and smartphone are the unavoidable presence of work and all its demands and responsibilities – a constant reminder and source of guilt, that you should be checking what’s happening, doing more. Home is no longer a retreat. There are fewer natural breaks, the periods when you’re walking to and from meetings, having a quick catch-up with colleagues – moments way from screens that add up over the course of a day in the office. Homeworkers have more time, and that time tends to be filled up with more online meetings and other tasks. It also means more multi-tasking, more windows open at any one time, more gadgets switched on and flashing with new notifications.

It’s important that homeworkers are equipped with tactics to counter technostress and its impact on concentration, engagement and mental health in general. That means adopting ‘IT distancing’, making sure that daily routines always include regular breaks away from any kind of IT device, including personal smartphones and tablets, or making sure there are non-IT related tasks to spend time on. Breaks should be both planned and spontaneous. Very importantly, they should involve non-digital distraction. Employees need to know they are in control by initiating their own strict rules for when email is turned off, when checks take place and when they don’t; when a phone can be left behind. Moreover, when employees do experience stress, then just talking to someone with the same frustrations about using IT is a valuable and constructive way to get the negative emotions out of the system.

Human brain chemistry isn’t going to evolve to meet digital demands anytime soon; and IT is only going to become more essential to everyday lives. For HR teams that means recognising that access to remote technologies isn’t just an enabler. IT can mean stress, isolation, insecurity. People will need more than IT support; they will need IT related wellbeing support.

In the coming months and years we will all need to combine awareness of technostress as an issue (making use of some practical coping tactics) with cultivating a sense of acceptance of technology, our control of it and our skills to make best use of what it can offer.

Monideepa Tarafdar is a professor of information systems at Lancaster University Management School and a Visiting Scholar at the MIT Sloan School’s Center for Information Systems Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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