Technostress – How can we manage it’s impact?

I think it’s fair to say that technologies such as AI, automation and digitisation are beginning to change working conditions across a broad range of jobs. We’ve seen job roles including call centre workers, copywriters and music producers being augmented or replaced. While you can argue whether this is a good or a bad thing, new technologies are creating new circumstances for organisations, businesses, and individuals, as well as new challenges and problems companies and employees.

SOHAS is beginning to give people advice on the increasing introduction of AI, automation, and digitisation into their jobs within our job retention service. People are concerned that new technologies are affecting their psychological workplace health and they are being stressed by the technological elements of their job, which results in Technostress.  Until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t heard of the term “Technostress”. When I first heard it mentioned I thought it might have been a name of a Kraftwerk song, but the term was first coined in China in the early 2000’s and I think we are going to hear the term being used more widely in the future.

Technostress is anxiety, tension, or distress caused when a person is overwhelmed by new technology. It occurs when they are unable to adapt and learn to use technology in a healthy, productive way.

While we believe the increasing introduction of AI, automation and digitisation into more jobs is going to be positive, there are some challenges for organisations who want to go down this route. For clarity here are some definitions

• AI – a system that shows “intelligent” behaviour, that can perceive its environment, take its own decisions to achieve a specified goal and can develop its own capabilities, mainly based on large amounts of data.
• Automation – machines (mechanical or digital) that perform work according to specified algorithms
• Digitalization – the use of digital tools in work tasks.

And some examples of their roles in the world of work:

• The widespread use of chat bots on websites around customer service roles
• A supermarket ordering stock using a computer model of trends and past history rather than a manager deciding what to order.
• The use of Video technologies for working from home.

I think most of us have experienced technostress at some time, in my case trying to order a part for a computer from a supplier where I had to ask “can I speak to a human being” because the bot couldn’t relate a part number to the part I was looking for.

So, what can be done when companies are looking to introduce new technologies if they are going minimise the impact on their employee’s mental health and wellbeing?

I think a key area that organisations often struggle with is about the design of a job role. Whether that’s the initial design or making sure that the role is updated in line any changes to someone’s job role. How many of us have a job which is out of date when you compare what you do now and what it is says on your job description

When we give advice to people who want help on their workplace health issues, we are often told that people don’t feel that they have sufficient control of their job role. The Goldilocks principle comes in here, as there is evidence that people don’t want too little or too much control in their job, they want something in the middle.

So, could giving employees a role in how a job that is designed and implemented when it involves AI, automation, and digitisation, be a way of minimising technostress?

I think it could, when technostress can be caused by employees that are unable to adapt and learn to use technology in a healthy, productive way.

While it’s easy to say “give the employee a role in job design” how can you do that?

I think the answer can be found in job crafting. Job crafting is a term that not that many people are familiar with, but it is something that lots of people actively do without relating it to the term. Here’s the definition:

Job crafting is a means of describing the ways in which employees utilise opportunities to customise their jobs by actively changing their tasks and interactions with others at work. Breaking down job crafting, there are two components that illustrate how this could be done.

• Task crafting: employees modifying their tasks by changing levels of task variety, adding, or removing tasks, or amending how tasks are completed.
• Skill crafting: employees acquiring new skills or enhancing existing ones to improve technology competence.

Adopting these principles could help in help to minimise any impact that AI, automation and digitisation may have on employee’s health and wellbeing.

While automation and digitisation of jobs and roles have been around for a long time, AI is what employers focus appears to be on. I’ve spoken to people who are using AI that enables them to work more efficiently and to increase the quality of their work output. If you want advice on work and health issues from SOHAS, are you going to end up talking to bot? No, you aren’t, but we are already using AI in delivering our advice services and this will increase over the next few months.

AI, automation and digitisation are going to increasingly more prevalent in the world of work and we should embrace them, but their introduction has to be thought through and implemented in the best way possible or in the future we are going to create another layer of issues that will affect employee’s productivity and their health and wellbeing.