A consequence of our always connected digital world is that more and more people are suffering from the effects of burn-out. The World Health Organisation defines burn-out as a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress which is characterised by feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion, increased mental distance from one’s job, feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job and reduced professional efficacy.
Jennifer Moss, author of ‘The Burnout Epidemic,’ gave some great insights into this phenomenon in September at a Harvard Business Review online presentation.
She stressed that burn-out results from unresolved stress at work. This means that it’s not just an employee problem, something that we have to go away and fix by ourselves, but it is an organisational one, where the digital culture of a company has a direct impact on the health and wellbeing of its employees. According to Jennifer Moss’s research, the six root causes of burn-out are: overwork, lack of control, insufficient rewards, loneliness, lack of fairness, and mismatched skills.
One of the consequences of spending more time at work, an increased pressure to be constantly available and the blurring of the boundaries between our work and personal lives is the increased feeling of ‘brain fog’. This is where we are unable to focus and find it difficult to make up our minds. Small decisions and tasks feel enormous and we become more dysfunctional and find it harder to express our thoughts and ideas.
I’m currently co-authoring some guidelines for managers on this important topic with three other international certified digital wellbeing coaches in association with Conscious Digital, which will be published later this year, so watch this space.
Digital wellbeing is about helping organisations to create a sustainable digital culture in which both they and their employees can prosper. It’s about embedding digital wellbeing into business as usual in much the same way as quality and data security. Coaching can be a really effective way for organisations, as well as individuals, to achieve this.
