A new study published in Sage Journals looked at stress, burnout, and mental health implications in the digital workplace.
“The digital workplace gives workers so much more autonomy and flexibility in their work and helps them be productive and collaborative whether in the office or working remotely,” study author Elizabeth Marsh told us. “As a research team, we’re acutely aware of these benefits, but also concerned about aspects of digital working that can have a negative impact on employee health and wellbeing.”
With this in mind, the researchers investigated whether stress, overload, anxiety and FoMO (fear of missing out) that employees experience in the digital workplace has a negative impact on the state of their mental health and level of burnout. Although there is a growing body of research going back over a decade on the dark side of digital working, there has not yet been much research on impacts to mental health, or on the role that FoMO might play.
“Based on prior research, we hypothesized that overload, FoMO and anxiety related to the digital workplace would lead to greater burnout and poorer mental health,” Marsh told us. “We also expected that by increasing employees’ level of stress in relation to using digital technologies, there would be further negative effects on burnout and mental health from these experiences.”
The research team chose to engage in this study for a number of reasons. Marsh explained that several current workplace themes underline the importance of understanding digital workplace job demands and their impact on wellbeing. The first is the heightened concern in organizations about employee mental health and burnout since the global pandemic.
“The second is the increasing prevalence of hybrid work styles, meaning that employees are increasingly dependent on digital tools to get work done,” Marsh told us. « Overload and FoMO have been indicated by previous research as important ‘dark side effects’ that may have a detrimental impact on wellbeing for digital workers. We therefore focused in on them to understand how they are related to each other, and to wellbeing.”
The researchers surveyed 142 workers from a variety of UK organizations who use digital technology at work to understand their experiences of overload, FoMO, stress and anxiety in the digital workplace as well as their perceptions of their own mental health and levels of burnout.
“The fear of missing out on information was indicated as the greatest risk factor for the mental health of employees working digitally,” Marsh told us. “Partly this appeared to occur by elevating employees’ level of stress when using the digital workplace.”
In addition, both FoMO and information overload appear to be contributing to employees’ sense of being exhausting at work, which is a key aspect of burnout. Elevated stress levels in the digital workplace play a role here.
“The standout message was that issues relating to the flow of information in the digital workplace – especially an overload of information and a fear of missing out on it – were particularly detrimental to worker wellbeing,” Marsh told us. “While this wasn’t exactly surprising, the strength of the message about the impact of organization’s information ecosystem on wellbeing was something we didn’t foresee.”
By contrast, workers seemed to experience less generalized anxiety in working digitally as well as in keeping in touch with colleagues and communications. This may be because of the step-change in using digital tools to relate and communicate since the pandemic, as well as general digital tools for productivity.
“While our research didn’t investigate underlying mechanisms for why FoMO/overload have such a detrimental effect, the findings do appear to suggest that organizations need to carefully consider how information is managed and disseminated to employees in the digital workplace,” Marsh told us. “More research is needed on the relationship between FoMO and overload indicated by our work.”
For instance, it is plausible to think that workers may worry about missing out on information because there is such a tsunami of information coming towards them via digital channels and platform. At the same time, that worry might lead workers to succumb to overload as they strive to keep up with e-mail, instant messages, news apps, corporate social networks, etc.
“Our findings may be of particular interest to professionals who manage digital workplaces, digital communicators and HR/ learning personnel,” Marsh told us, “both in terms of how information is managed and shared, as well as the policies and training options needed to support workers to leverage information effectively in the digital workplace.”