Business managers and employers have at least one thing in common: they want their teams to be able to perform at their best. With this comes the responsibility of ensuring that employees have all the technological tools needed to achieve performance peaks and contribute to the overall growth of their companies. Unfortunately, that new communication tool, project management software, or calendar app might be causing more harm than good.
Imagine working on a marketing presentation, and you need high-resolution images. Your first thought is to check the team’s Google Drive, but you cannot find the photos there, so you switch to a separate task management app to dig for updates. When you ultimately don’t find what you’re looking for there, you switch to another team messaging app to ask your team. You finally learn that the images are in the newest team Dropbox instead, and now you must start searching for your login information.
With more pressure to be productive, higher expectations, and less time for work, asking team members to learn new complex tools on their own can be incredibly stressful.
Technology Overload Leads to Employee Fatigue
Information is coming from everywhere, and employees are left scrambling to figure out where to find the information they need to complete their tasks. Studies show that 68% of employees toggle between 10 apps in a single hour, with 69% of workers wasting up to sixty minutes a day navigating between different technology tools. For perspective, this data illustrates that employees waste up to thirty-two days a year simply just trying to locate pertinent company information required for fundamental everyday roles. Increasingly, being bogged down by technology can lead to an industry term known as technostress,’ which is negative symptoms directly related to the use and adoption of new technologies. Here’s how to identify the issues of technostress and prevent them at your company:
What Exactly is Technostress?
As the name implies, technostress is the stress and negative psychological impact of introducing new technologies at work. Technostress is problematic because the body only has one stress-response – sympathetic nervous system activation. Too much chronic stress is bad for an employee’s physical and mental health. To better assess the rate of technostress occurring in their companies, business managers should be on the look-out for:
- Overload: “I can’t keep up with all these tasks!”: In today’s world, work rarely stays at work. Employees are often overloaded by interruptions on and off the clock, with the average office worker receiving 121 emails every day.
- Invasion: “Technology is taking over my life!”: Thanks to smartphones and high-speed internet, most workers have no choice but to take work home with them. Communication between teams is rarely restricted to just the workplace, so it’s no wonder that the workforce is feeling more stressed.
- Complexity: “This technology is too complicated!”: Workers with and without previous extensive technological knowledge face uphill battles when trying to learn jargon across company software. Even Gmail has options and settings that require a guide these days.
Technostress results in performance anxiety and is a real sense of insecurity that puts even greater pressure on employees. Unfortunately, most office workers are expected to learn new tools by themselves (without training) as they go about their days. Worst of all, technostress can lead to job insecurity, as they feel that they could be replaced at any minute by someone who was able to learn the technology more quickly.
G7 Tech Services Has Your Back
By now, we know that technology is either what facilitates or hinders both overall business success and employee mental health. For better or worse, humans shape technologies, but our lives are then shaped by the technologies we create. At G7 Tech Services, we are used to meeting frustrated clients and losing sleep over stressors caused by technology. Our team knows how to automate the day-to-day tasks that bog down enterprises by taking the time to understand exactly what an organization needs. We take action by locating a company’s exact needs and then implement the correct solution to empower innovation.
Running on coffee all day long and losing nights and weekends is no way to live. Recognizing that technology is an essential aspect of our well-being helps G7 Tech Services guide companies in choosing the specific technologies allowed into business.
Ready to change your life? Request a demo to learn more about how we can help you today!