Why is technostress suddenly starting to pinch?
Why is technostress suddenly starting to pinch?
Data from HIVE360 suggests there has been a 155% increase in the number of employees making use of confidential mental health support services.
Why? The suspicion is that the return to more normal routines, or at least a more normal context for working, has also meant the return of normal expectations. Businesses are looking to make up lost ground, re-assert themselves, and that is dependent on the energy and productivity of employees.
The pandemic, for some, meant a loosening of demands. Only so much could be expected from people dealing will such serious threats of illness, with caring responsibilities and the disruption of what tasks were even possible in practice. But expectations are believed to have snapped back.
Feeling technostress
Authors of the HIVE360 report point to ‘technostress’ as being a new major cause of problems with mental wellbeing at work: where the use of IT, either struggling to adapt to ever-changing technologies or being sucked into an over-use and over-reliance on digital devices, leads to anxiety and burnout.
Employees are being expected to maintain their productivity and efficiency and that means quicker, more complete engagement with IT tools. Ongoing WFH and greater dependence on digital methods of working and communications is only intensifying the issue.
This is triggering a number of worrying mental and emotional issues from the stress and negative psychological impact of so much online working and virtual meetings, which is still more than ever, despite the return to the office for many, and the trend for hybrid working,” said David McCormack, CEO of HIVE360.
Recommendations to help mitigate technostress include: raising awareness of the existence of ‘technostress’ and its causes and symptoms; tracking the use of IT outside of work hours to identify trends; actively encouraging digital switch-off times and a reduction in unnecessary digital messaging; and providing more mental health training for managers.
Human intervention
EAPA UK chair Eugene Farrell said: “Digital tools have delivered one revolution after another in terms of how we work, its speed and efficiency. They have also opened up new channels for stress and anxiety. Channels that are increasingly automated – and inhuman.
“That’s why human services such as those provided via EAPs are such an important offering for employees. It’s useful to help managers become more aware of issues relating to mental health, how they can identify problems and signpost support – but it’s too much to expect staff already anxious about their performance and workload pressures to want to go to their line manager, at least not until it’s already too late. They want a human being to speak to.”