“It’s that pressure to respond, like when I get an email and I think I have to do it quickly because if not, someone will think: ‘What are you doing at home?’ and “the truth is that I leave my phone in the car at night, so I’m not tempted to look at it” are two of the responses compiled by a new study on the challenges of hybrid work, the most common combination of in-person and teleworking. since the pandemic.
Right now the RAE has accepted “teleworking” as a new word, but society is years ahead and has encountered the problems that come with mixing going to the office and remote work. This new hybrid format, increasingly common in computer-based jobs, has received a lot of attention from academia. New qualitative research delves into the nuances based on 14 in-depth interviews conducted in 2022 with people between 27 and 60 years old from all types of job profiles. “The article provides concrete ideas about how the work experience is lived in a digital environment with high demands and intense use of technology,” says Elizabeth Marsh, co-author and professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Nottingham. “It analyzes how employees perceive being hyperconnected and feeling overwhelmed with their digital work, and the consequences for their mental and physical health,” he adds.
The five themes most repeated by those interviewed about the “dark side” of this new work modality are hyperconnectivity, digital fatigue, problems and failures of the digital environment, fear of missing out on information, and technological stress. Citing previous research, the article says that hybrid workers, in part due to the “productivity paranoia” of distrustful bosses, “may spend up to 67 extra minutes a day to avoid being thought to be slacking.”
Some of the phrases cited in the article are extremely common among office workers’ complaints about this new and established hybrid work: “You feel like you have to be there all the time, as if you have to be that little green light always on”, “I’m I’m on Slack all the time on my phone, and sometimes it affects other things I should be doing” or “I could be working, but I get distracted and think, ‘I’m going to check my emails,’ and next thing I know, I’ve spent half an hour looking emails without doing anything specific.”
Hybrid work and the digital environment also have advantages: “They can be good for both well-being and productivity,” says Marsh. ”To avoid the negative effects, or what we call the ‘dark side’, depends on how organizations approach digital tools, involve workers in the process and give them the skills and mindset necessary to have a healthy digital work life” .
There are many applications and platforms that serve this digital environment: “I think Microsoft Teams is really overwhelming because it is so many different things,” says one person interviewed. But the researchers have not found that there is any particularly culprit application. “In our study, participants especially struggled with the overload of emails, chat messages, and video conferences,” says Marsh. For some participants, the number of communication channels available in the digital environment was stressful as they try to keep up with everyone.
Although the age of the workers does not seem notable, the researchers have found that the elderly faced more obstacles in their digital challenges: “All the workers interviewed, regardless of age, felt the effects of technological intensity. The older people seemed to be at greater risk of stress and anxiety specifically due to difficulties performing daily tasks online, using new or updated tools, or internet outages,” details the researcher.
The feeling of overload is more of a perception than a point of no return. The solutions lie in better focusing workers’ efforts, according to Marsh: “Participants talked about how the digital work experience has intensified, especially since the pandemic. “We need to think about the mental and emotional effort that is increasingly being asked of employees and how we can reduce it to protect well-being and improve productivity.”
