The Digital Workspace
The digital workspace has been developing since the advent of email and the internet in workplaces in the early 2000s but recently boomed with the COVID-19 pandemic, normalising ‘working from home’ and instigating a shift to hybrid working as a norm of office life. Whilst the benefits of these digital technologies have been noted – with psychologists since the start of the 20th century considering working from home to increase people’s work-life balance and well-being, offering flexibility and enhanced concentration – what is the flip side of this shift in lifestyle and work culture?
Effects of Hybrid-Working: Constant Communication & Work-Life Balance
The praise bestowed on these new technologies has been claims of increased communication and collaboration, efficiency and productivity, and a more flexible approach to working hours. However, the flip-side of all these benefits is constant communication, and blurred work-life boundaries. Increased communication means your phone going off at lunch time or being bombarded with emails on a supposed ‘day off’. Productivity and efficiency may increase without office distractions, but without the social aspect and with no clearly defined end to the working day, what is the impact on the mental health of employees? And increased flexibility is great until you find yourself working weekends and evenings because your laptop is right there and overtime is no longer an in-the-office thing. Not to mention the lifestyle impact of hours sat in front of a screen.
Bringing psychology into the conversation: it is a well-established concept that we benefit from associating separate spaces with specific activities. One technique known to help insomnia is reducing the association between their bed and the feeling of wakefulness. The digital workspace can blur these boundaries. Whilst previously the office may have been the associated workplace, whilst home was a place of relaxation and family, now we carry our work into the home with us. The blurring of these physical boundaries becomes psychological – the brain never switches off fully from work.
Lack of Boundaries
With this possibility of constant work, stress rises. There is more onus on us to set these work-life boundaries – something easier said than done. With the ability to reach someone at any second, the workplace seems to expect the ability to respond at any second. This pressure can lead to a constant feeling of obligation to work – checking emails, responding to phone calls, working overtime at home. In the end, the lack of these boundaries and constant – even low-level – work increases the possibility of burnout, whilst, conversely, being unavailable can lead to a feeling of guilt, especially for those who carry roles of high responsibility in their jobs.
The Digital Workspace for Students
Whilst this is workplace-specific, we see this in student life as well – carrying around our stress in the form of laptops and phones, pinging with emails and dreaded Blackboard notifications. Every student has worked from their bed at some point, breaking that all-important rule of space association – not only impacting work-time productivity, but sleep too, as the bed is no longer a place of rest.
This cross-association transfers too onto the technologies themselves. As phones and laptops are made for entertainment (with YouTube, online shopping, quizzes), as well as work, the two are already conflated. With the distractions that come along with the dual-purpose of these devices, there is an epidemic of ‘half-working’. An hour’s work comes along with a quick check of our emails, replying to our friend’s text message which just popped up, a quick scroll on TikTok. This constant half-working exacerbates this stress and impedes our productivity, so that work is even more likely to infringe on our lives.
With these habits of lacking work-life boundaries and constant low-level working being carried into the workplace at a time when self-imposing these boundaries are more important than ever, it looks like burnout for a future generation of workers.
What can you do?
Therefore, learning to build these boundaries as students is essential to a later maintenance of a work-life balance. Having the discipline to switch off from our work can be just as much of a challenge as making ourselves settle down to study. In fact, the two are interlinked: with the feeling that work can be done at any time, there is no end-point. The flexibility becomes more of a curse than a blessing. But with these boundaries, you may be surprised at, not only the improvement in your stress and mental health, but your productivity within those working hours.
So, with the digital workspace rewiring how we live, the real challenge is not to keep up – it’s knowing when to step back, switch off, take a rest. Just because we can always be working, it doesn’t mean we should, and this discipline is just as crucial as the work itself. The real priority now in preserving our mental health and stress levels is setting these boundaries – and knowing not just when to work, but when to stop.