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Employee stress is a major social issue both within and outside of our workplaces. As of 2022, stress had increased medical expenses and decreased productivity at an estimated annual cost of up to $300 billion in high-income countries. In the workplace, a proliferation of digital tools and applications, such as Zoom and generative AI, can cause technostress, or mental exhaustion resulting from technology use.1
While few businesses assess the high costs of technostress, even fewer are aware of its more positive potential. When introduced and managed deliberately, tech tools can promote employees’ work satisfaction and engagement by offering new opportunities for personal and professional development, and a resulting sense of accomplishment. On the other hand, constant adaptation to new digital tools dampens employee morale, which can be further exacerbated by the introduction of surveillance and tracking tools that may increase productivity but also provoke negative employee responses. Beyond raising employee stress levels, technology can also increase job dissatisfaction, burnout, and turnover rates, further compounding the pressure on the employees who remain.
Our laboratory experiments and large-scale surveys of thousands of employees have confirmed that many aspects of technology can hinder productivity, such as its inherent complexity, distracting notifications, and capacity to blur the boundaries between people’s work and personal lives. In addition, anxiety can increase and progress can slow when employees perceive tech tools as mechanisms for managers to replace them or monitor their performance.2 But while tech challenges may be interpreted as highly stressful, they can also produce endorphins and motivate achievement, greatly improving employee well-being and productivity, as well as loyalty to an employer.
Managers’ Role in Changing Worker Perceptions
In workplace contexts, it is the kind of stress and employees’ reaction to it, not the quantity of stress, that matters.3 Irrespective of the type of technology that creates stress for employees, the impact depends on whether workers perceive it as an inconvenient obstacle or a welcome challenge. A reframing that presents new technologies as exciting opportunities to grow, work smarter, and collaborate better can elevate employee productivity, morale, and retention.
That reframing starts with distinguishing challenges from hindrances and avoiding ambivalence.
Distinguishing Challenges From Hindrances
Most managers overlook the productive potential of tech stress, focusing instead on reducing hindrances, which we define in our research as stressors interpreted as obstacles to work-related activities. Hindrances offer employees no challenge or sense of motivation, fulfillment, or achievement. They are purely negative, inconvenient stressors that do not provide constructive opportunities for growth. The following are common examples:4
- Technology that is unreliable, unavailable, overly complex, or malfunctions frequently, impairing work activities.
- Frequent interruptions and notifications, which can fracture concentration.
- Surveillance or tracking tools that invade employees’ privacy to monitor and assess their performance.
- Technology that frequently updates or changes, which requires employees to continually adjust work processes and creates uncertainty and frustration.
Challenges, on the other hand, are positive stressors that are interpreted as true growth opportunities. They can encourage motivation and boost feelings of achievement and fulfillment. Here are some examples:5
- Technology that enables a fast pace, the ability to work on multiple tasks or projects simultaneously, and the completion of work.
- Technology that requires employees to use a broad set of skills, enabling them to learn and develop new abilities.
- Technologies, such as enterprise systems, that offer front-line employees access and authority previously reserved for supervisors, so they can solve complex problems.
- Organizational practices that encourage and reward experimenting with and using new tech tools.
- Organizational practices that involve employees in making IT decisions rather than subject them to top-down decisions.
Beyond the challenges and obstacles discussed below are new concerns about generative AI, which were not within the scope of our research. The managerial response to the perceived stress and threat of AI will differ from the approaches we suggest below. Most tech stressors concern how work is accomplished, but because GenAI may call into question the very necessity of human employees, the remedies described here are insufficient. Leaders who leave these fears unaddressed will find them surfacing as disengagement, absenteeism, and reduced productivity.6
Avoiding Ambivalence
Our data shows that hindrances and challenges do not cancel each other out. The two inherently conflict and are difficult to reconcile. Yet the advice commonly given to managers is to control hindrance stressors while simultaneously promoting more challenge stressors.7
Our recent data sets have shown that the simultaneous presence of negative and positive tech stressors leads to a highly problematic side effect: ambivalence, or the state of having mixed or contradictory attitudes and feelings. The difficulty of reconciling a plurality of conflicting stressors sets in motion a subconscious process that employees perceive as taxing, effortful, and exhausting.
Ambivalence is almost always experienced negatively and is strongly linked to frustration and distress. It can manifest in internal conflict, anxiety, and even angst that drives over-stressed workers to seek ways to cope — possibly, in extreme cases, by quitting their jobs.8 When employees experience this ambivalent tension between embracing and feeling overwhelmed by technology, job satisfaction drops and attrition and turnover increase.
Guidance for Balancing Tech Stressors
To challenge their workforces rather than impede productivity, leaders must address the tech stressors they impose on employees to mitigate ambivalent and negative reactions.
Reducing hindrances before implementing challenges is novel advice that has not been previously given to managers.9 We propose a proactive, three-part approach and offer additional strategies to create a stimulating work environment that offers positive challenges while managing stressful hindrances and mitigating employee ambivalence.10
Step 1: Reduce Technology Hindrances
First, leaders need to understand the current level of technical challenges and hindrances their employees face. This can be done through surveys about technology-related work stress.
Approaches to addressing hindrances can be divided into three categories:11
- Targeting personal factors involves mindfulness and technology training, strengthening empl
