Technostress: Causes, impact, and best practices

It's not easy working in the tech industry in 2023. New information and communication technologies are released daily, and learning how to use new digital toolsand existing ones takes a toll on workers, often leading to technostress.

Although defined by the APA (American Psychological Association), the tech market does not often discuss technostress caused by the technology of its own information and communication technology (IT) departments.

However, organizations need to speak about technostress more often, as its effects cause employees to experience sleepless nights, headaches, and resistance to learning new technologies.

From an organizational perspective, technostress can lead to loss of income as a digital transformationbecomes unsuccessful despite significant investments, contributing to reduced ROI and increased inefficiencies and waste.

However, the first step is acknowledging the presence of technostress in your organization, educating staff with employee training, and then taking simple steps to support your team.

To help you understand the causes of technostress, we will explore the following topics:

• What is technostress?
• What is the organizational impact of technostress?
• What are the five causes of technostress?
• What are the challenges of reducing technostress?
• Best practices to reduce technostress

What is technostress?

Technostress results from using the Internet, phones, and other technology, making staff feel anxious or too tired to work and uncomfortable or hesitant to use technology.

Employees experiencing technostress begin to dislike their role and organization, affecting their mental health, leading to headaches and poor sleep, and reducing their performance and general well-being.

One example of a technostress coping behavior that results from a lack of job satisfaction is excessive use of social networking sites during work hours, reducing productivity.

What is the organizational impact of technostress?

The technology designed to improve employee productivity often pushes staff too far as they feel the weight of increased expectations on their performance. The outcome is often sickness and absence, showing how technology can reduce performance if implemented incorrectly, resulting in technostress.

What are the five causes of technostress?

Understanding the causes of technostress to reduce it in your workplace is essential.

Technostress is directly related to role ambiguity, conflict, supervisor lack of support, and work overload. In contrast, age and self-efficacy appear to play more indirect, buffering roles and remote working due to Covid-19.

1. Techno-insecurity

According to technostress research, employees in the IT sector have described "techno-insecurity" as the most significant stressor while working from home.

This finding aligns with a study conducted by Spagnoli et al. (2020), which identified the following reasons for techno-insecurity:

• Fear of job loss because of new hires.
• Frequent upgrades to ICT systems.
• Pressure to improve skills.

Numerous reports indicate that the trend of working from home has caused many employees to worry about losing their jobs. This scenario is not only due to the ongoing pandemic but also because technology is advancing rapidly, and employees struggle to keep up.

2. Techno-Overload

Digital overload occurs when exposure to tech devices such as smartphones, computers, or TV results in excess sensory information that exceeds your processing ability.

Indications that you might feel digital overload include irritability, anxiety, vision problems, sleep difficulties, and shifts in mood.

Causes of techno-overload can include:

• Excessive screen notifications
• Staring at blue light screens

3. Techno-Complexity

Techno-complexity describes how an organization develops a complex network of technologies, data, products or services, and people due to favorable business changes such as innovation, growth, and expanding product portfolios.

This complexity can be overwhelming for staff, leading to the symptoms of technostress, so CTOs should try to reduce techno-complexity where possible to increase employee well-being and streamline processes.

4. Techno-Invasion

Techno-invasion refers to the constant connectivity of being "always exposed" that blurs desired boundaries between work and personal life and represents an emerging phenomenon of scholarly investigation.

As work-related use of information technology (IT) during non-work time leads to techno-invasion, little data exists about whether techno-invasion may engender employees' deviant behaviors.

This behavior violates organizational norms and may harm the organization, its members, or both.

The effects of techno-invasion on staff include the following:

• Self-regulation impairment: Reducing an employee's ability to control bad habits, like social media use at work.
• Reduced IT mindfulness: An employee's focus on creativity using IT and learning and discovering new and more efficient ways to use IT.
• It negatively moderates the relationship between techno-invasion and self-regulation impairment, thus serving as a remedy to alleviate or prevent self-regulation impairment and deviant employee behavior.

5. Role ambiguity/ role conflict

Burnout is associated with role conflict and role ambiguity. Role ambiguity arises when uncertainty, lack of clarity, or unpredictability in one's job responsibilities or organizational objectives, possibly due to an indistinct or vague job description.

Employees who work diligently on a significant project may feel disheartened when it is put on hold or given a lower priority. Similarly, employees who lack clarity about their job's scope, required goals, and priorities are more likely to experience role ambiguity.

On the other hand, role conflict refers to situations where an employee faces conflicting demands that they cannot meet.

The reason may be conflicting expectations of being a supervisor and a friend, conflicting goals of providing quality service while cutting costs, or the challenge of performing a job that goes against one's values.

What are the challenges of reducing technostress?

Technostress is a complex issue, as technology is needed in the workplace to achieve tasks efficiently. However, awareness of these challenges can help leaders overcome them to maintain employee well-being.

Technology is essential for growth

One of the most challenging balancing acts in business is ensuring an organization constantly implements new technologies to compete in the marketplace while limiting the impact of these technologies on staff.

The computer revolution is essential to stay competitive, but it's also remembering that it can cause stress.

Culture is challenging to get right

Fostering a healthy culture is one of the most significant challenges for enterprises.

The reason is that culture involves managing the desires and expectations of thousands of individuals and unifying them into the goals of an organization which most team members have not contributed to building.

Resistance to change is common

Resistance to change refers to adjusting to new situations or methods. It can manifest in individuals, relationships, or organizations and typically arises from a fear of uncertainty which is typical human behavior when facing change.

An excellent example of how employees can resist change as they feel that new technology will replace them is generative AI.

Optimize new technology acceptance and reduce resistance to change by showing employees how to use technology to improve their lives, reducing technostress and improving well-being.

Best practices to reduce technostress

When you deploy new technologies in your organization, you want employees to optimize their use as they learn to use them quickly and within their comfort zone.

However, employees often experience anxiety, leading to panic attacks, prolonged stress, decreased motivation, and burnout.

Follow these best practices to reduce technostress and improve employee productivityand well-being.

Limit experimentation

Introduce the approved technology that works well for the task at hand. Instead of introducing five different technologies, find the one that offers the most features and covers the job of all five technologies, such as a superapp.

Foster a supportive, listening culture

Many 2023 scientific research articles, such as the study by Galicia et al.and a separate survey by Bencsik et al., call organizational culture critical to reducing or eliminating technostress in the tech industry.

The reason is that a culture of listening to team members and ensuring they are the priority, not performance goals, provides that technology is secondary to the well-being of employees, allowing them to be motivated by their organization and perform of their volition.

Respond to this research by fostering a supportive, listening culture where the staff knows who to contact about technostress.

Offer informative literature about technostress and technology addiction to make them aware of how these issues can create stress and reduce them before they occur.

Deploy a DAP (digital adoption platform)

Software paralysis can occur when employees have too many applications with overlapping functions, making them unsure which app to use for a specific purpose and feel they must learn too many new apps simultaneously.

A DAP(digital adoption platform) helps reduce software paralysis with in-app guidanceand personalized training to help staff understand the purpose of each app and identify apps with overlapping functions to report this to IT, reducing waste and technostress.

Plan in advance

Gradually introduce changes and new computer technologies, and be realistic about what's possible within your digital innovation efforts.

When you plan investment for new technologies, conduct a risk assessment on how it will affect staff and collect employee feedback on how the team feels a new technology would impact their role.

Offer adequate training

Ensure employees receive the offer of adequate training to familiarize them with new technologies and time for adjustment to encourage staff to use new tech through understanding why the organization needs it and the incentives for the employee to include it in their workflow.

Provide outdoor spaces

Academic technostress researchby Caracuto et al. found that access to natural outdoor spaces reduced the likelihood of technostress in WFH employees. But you could also apply this to larger offices with outdoor areas.

Tackle technostress before it impacts your employees and organizational goals

Technostress is a growing problem with severe consequences for employees and organizations.

To prevent technostress in organizations, team managers and the C-suite need to minimize the triggers that cause it.

Building a trustworthy corporate culture is crucial; managers are instrumental in achieving this. Providing technology training to all employees in the organization should also be a priority.

Don't ignore the issue - tackle technostress before it impacts your employees and organizational goals.