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Better Life Lab: Technostress

Slate Daily Feed

Slate

Business, News, Society & Culture

3.91.1K Ratings

🗓️ 3 May 2022

⏱️ 49 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

PTSD. Burnout. Depression. That’s what you get from a too stressful workplace. And — employers take note — you also get reduced commitment to work, and much higher costs. As workplaces have navigated the COVID pandemic, new technologies have amped those stresses to 11. Bossware. Tattleware. After-hours nastiness on Slack. Now there’s a whole different kind of “technostress” wearing on warehouse and retail workers, whose every movement is tracked and rated by algorithms. Researchers are only beginning to study the impact “technostress” has on workers, from toxic interpersonal relationships to “email apnea” Tech is here to stay — but how can we foster healthier, less “technostress”-inducing work cultures? Guests Roxanne Felig, doctoral student at the University of South Florida, who was cyber bullied online after publishing her first major research paper — and publicizing it on TikTok. Adrian Ugalde, retail worker at a big box store in LA Maddie Swenson, who quit her remote job as a creative director because of the stress of being monitored with Bossware. Ashley Nixon, Associate Professor of Human Resource Management and Organizational Behavior at Willamette University. Resources Workplace Monitoring and Surveillance, Data and Society, 2019 Technostress Dark Side of Technology in the Workplace: A Scientometric Analysis, Bondanini et al, 2020. Technostress: Implications for Adults in the Workplace, Atanasoff & Venable, 2017 Workplace bullying jeopardizes employees’ life satisfaction: the roles of job anxiety and insomnia, Nauman, Malik & Jalil, 2019 The Workplace-Surveillance Technology Boom, Natalie Chyi, New America Weekly, 2020 Are you Breathing? Do you have email apnea? Linda Stone, 2014 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Remember when the idea of working remotely from home seemed relaxing?

0:08.7

A nice cup of coffee, cat on your lap, secretly wearing your favorite fuzzy slippers as you

0:14.3

type away very, very productively.

0:18.3

But all of that was before your boss installed boss wear on your laptop to keep tabs on

0:23.4

you.

0:24.4

Before your supervisor expected you to check email or slack at all hours, a camera watched

0:29.6

your every move or a colleague rolled their eyes at something you said on Zoom.

0:36.6

Welcome to the age of techno stress.

0:39.6

It makes me extremely distrustful of the company and also just feeling like a child getting

0:45.6

monitored all the time.

0:47.1

This computer says that based off the sale that you had last year, you don't need that many

0:51.2

manpower.

0:52.2

It's not just some of the normal negative acts that we see in the workplace.

0:57.6

It's really this workplace bullying on steroids.

1:01.4

I just couldn't sleep at all.

1:02.6

My heart was racing.

1:04.4

I had to silence Twitter, deactivate the app from my phone.

1:08.3

But then I would end up checking the web app online because I was just so anxious and

1:12.8

worried about what was being said about me.

1:18.2

I'm Bridget Shulti.

1:19.7

It's techno stress and what it will take to deal with it.

1:23.9

Next, on Better Lifelab.

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