Behind the screens: The impact of workplace tech on mental health during the pandemic
Computer and mobile phone screens have long been part of our working lives. The flexibility, connectivity and sheer convenience they provide is undoubtedly a positive thing, and few white collar jobs now exist without them.
Covid-19 has made these devices even more fundamental to the fabric of many millions of jobs across the world. Indeed, without the remote working capabilities they offer, the economic consequences of the pandemic would surely have been much worse.
However, all this time spent alone behind screens at home poses a question - what is it doing to our mental health, and how does it impact a workplace burnout problem already at crisis point before the pandemic? To find out, Journify teamed up with anonymous professional networking platform Blind to ask 6,000 professionals about their relationship with tech during lockdown.
Emails
Let’s start with that staple of workplace life - emails. Emails are like taxes; we don’t like them, we think we have too many of them, but when all’s said and done they’re probably necessary. One of the charges often levelled against portable devices for work is they create an always-on culture, where employees are obligated to be on call 24/7.
In all, we found that 36% of respondents felt under pressure to reply to a work email regardless of the time of day. That’s a pretty huge number, considering how many hours were awake and how many emails we get during a typical day. Among the worst offending companies were Uber and Microsoft, where 39% and 37% of employees respectively are anxiously checking inboxes at all hours.
Productivity
What about the thorny issue of productivity, or rather, perceived productivity. One of the key advantages of workplace tech is that it has the potential to free employees from the almost universally hated 9-5 culture, better suited to factories of the industrial revolution than the 21st century office.
One might assume mass working from home during lockdown would be another nail in the coffin for this outdated practice. In fact, we found that 25% of respondents felt the need to contact their boss often, or stay at their laptop so they appeared to be working hard remotely. Whilst it’s great that many don’t ‘clock in’ virtually, the fact that a quarter of us are still obligated to put on a show of being productive via a device with the potential to release us from that most archaic of demands is problematic.
Working hours
That brings us to the issue of hours worked by employees, and managerial recognition for those hours. We asked respondents whether they feel like their boss values them based on how many hours they work - with 28% saying yes, and 72% no. Interestingly that could mean a few things. Either a significant minority of workers are slaving away with no appreciation of their efforts, or a healthy majority of managers are (rightly) considering results rather than time worked as the key measure of their employee’s efforts, or it’s a bit of both.
With the legacy of the pandemic sure to have a lasting impact on the workplace in the future, these statistics reveal some interesting nuances. Whilst portable devices have been extremely effective for enabling and decentralising our workforces at a time of crisis, their use over long periods of time within the home is not without potential problems. Above all, the research demonstrates that, as with so much else, tech-based solutions to workplace challenges are only ever as effective as the people that implement and use them.
This article was based on data gathered in a survey conducted by Journify and Blind in June 2020.
