By Peter ThomsonIssue #10, Fall 2018
Tags: technology • stress • digital overload • leadership • digital age
Begin with this brief conversation between Jim Ware, Managing Editor of  Work&Place, and Peter Thomson about the new book that Peter produced and edited:
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Welcome to the Digital Age dream:
At last we have the life of leisure we’ve been waiting for. Since the dawn of the Internet some of us have been predicting a form of ‘technology heaven’. We have been anticipating a world where all the routine work is done by computers and the humans just get the interesting stuff. We have looked forward to the three-day week and four-day weekend. We have been preparing for work-life imbalance to turn into life-work harmony, where technology allows us to choose how we fit our work around the important things in life. We left stress behind in the Industrial Era and are all more relaxed about work. Now Artificial Intelligence (AI) is about to deliver the final pieces of this perfect picture.
The presenteeism culture, that had people sitting at their desks into the evening to impress their boss, has now been replaced by ‘virtual presenteeism’ where the boss now expects replies within an hour to his/her emails almost any time of day or night, any day of the week.
Wake up! It’s a dream.
Look around and the real world looks more like a nightmare! Instead of bringing shorter hours, digital technology follows us around 24/7. We have our smartphones at the dinner table in case there’s an urgent message. We take our laptops on vacation with us so we can keep in touch. And we take hours of our day simply trawling through the email inbox finding the important messages from amongst the hundreds coming in every day. Instead of giving back control over our lives, technology has taken over. Instead of contributing to our peace of mind, it has increased stress levels.
The World Health Organization,i (WHO) having called stress ‘the health epidemic of the 21st Century,’ has recently stated that ‘depression is the leading cause of ill health and disability worldwide’ and also, even more worryingly, predicts that by 2030 ‘there will be more people affected by depression than any other health problem’.
Why on earth is this happening? Why are we not all enjoying the life of leisure that was predicted? Surely technology has taken over some of the routine work leaving us with the more stimulating things to do? Flexible working has been around for a while now; surely it must have improved work-life balance?
It’s clear that something has gone wrong on the road to the promised land. Yes, we now have technology that gives us flexibility in the way we can work. We are no longer tied to a desk for long hours because our office travels with us in our pocket. You might expect that the ‘presenteeism’ culture, that drives long hours at work, has disappeared.
Unfortunately not. We are still expected to turn up to meetings at our employers’ premises and in most cases still expected to spend ‘core’ hours at a workstation typically staring at a screen or talking on the phone. Despite the ability for knowledge work to be done anywhere, the predominant model is still based on a fixed workplace.
We have simply added digital communications on top of the physical pattern of work. So instead of just dealing with the ‘in-tray’ on the desk and leaving it behind at the end of the day, we now have the email ‘in-box’ that follows us around.
The presenteeism culture, that had people sitting at their desks into the evening to impress their boss, has now been replaced by ‘virtual presenteeism’ where the boss now expects replies within an hour to his/her emails almost any time of day or night, any day of the week.
How people work, and the freedom they have to choose their own work environment, is critical for today’s knowledge economy.
How have we allowed this to happen?
This was the question faced by the Future Work Forumii two years ago when one member of this group of consultants raised the problem. It seemed that many organizations were suffering from ‘Digital Overload’ and were struggling to understand why. This observation triggered a collaborative effort from sixteen contributors to get to the bottom of the problem, and the result is a book published earlier this year.iii
The key conclusion from this research was that the ‘problem’ is a leadership issue. Leaders set the example, and that is reflected in the behaviour of the people beneath them. Organizational cultures that encourage long hours and ignore the impact on the rest of peoples’ lives are the cause of the problem. Digital technology is simply a tool that amplifies that reality and is the catalyst for increasing stress levels.
It is too easy for leaders to ignore this problem until it reaches a crisis level. Because ‘culture’ is an intangible subject it gets lost at board level amongst the hard financial figures and real operational problems. Executives will invest in capital equipment and would not deliberately run machinery above maximum speed/capacity knowing that it will break down as a result. They will ensure routine maintenance is carried out on equipment so it will work effectively and reliably….