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Maria Kuntz: Each episode, we include a key takeaway or LBIdea. Today’s LBIdea is that stress on technology affects different people in different ways, but there are strategies we can adopt to effectively reduce that stress.

Today, I'm joined by Jason Thatcher, the Tandean Rustandy Esteemed Endowed Chair at the Leeds School of Business at the �鶹��Ѱ�����. He's a prolific researcher and professor of information systems, whose work focuses on understanding how the interaction of people and technology changed the world we work in.

Jason, thank you so much for being with us today.

Jason Thatcher: Thank you for having me, Maria. I'm really excited to be here.

Kuntz: Wonderful. Let's get started. So, you recently co-authored some fascinating research on technostressors and technostrain. Before we get into your findings, can you tell us a little more about what those terms are and what interested you in the topic?

Thatcher: Sure. So, it's interesting because I'm an old 1.0 guy, which dates me, like, before my students were born, I was designing web pages. And one of the things that we found back then was that, when we introduced this ability for people to reach out over email, text message, cell phones, it changed the way we worked and the way we felt. And what got me really interested in this was you would go through these periods of time where you're really busy and getting an email made you feel good. And then other times you get emails and they do make you feel very good. And that connection between how much the technology is touching me, that's technostress, okay? And I got interested in it because I felt stressed a lot and I felt great a lot. And then strain is feeling that outcome. It's how you make that feel. Then strain is, do I feel happy in my job? Do I feel burned out? Am I less satisfied? And those are the outcomes that occur. So, it was my lived experience.

Kuntz: Wow, yeah, I can definitely relate to the variable impact of email on one's state. So, can you take us through the different types of technostressors?

Thatcher:��So, there's lots of different ways of thinking about it. Okay, there's this general idea that just all the ways the technology touches me is technostress in general. And then you have different consequences, like, you have techno overload where technology makes me feel like I have too much going on. I have techno invasion where I feel like the technology is letting people intrude into my life and it's causing me stress. I can have ambiguity introduced by technology. So, before I knew what I was doing and now I have all these competing demands placed on me, which makes me feel this ambiguity about what I should be doing, or I may even have, like, techno conflict where I feel like I'm getting competing demands sent to me by different people at the same time, or I have different technologies asking for different things. So, imagine that you have your Amazon Alexa in the background saying, “Hey, here's this package that's delivered.” My phone is beeping with text messages. It's blowing up from my kid saying, “You forgot to get me from school.” Then I have a cell phone ringing next to me and it's my boss.

And what's interesting about technostressors is there's so many different forms of it, right? We can define lots of little unique niche forms of it, or we can talk about the big picture idea that just technology, in general, stresses me out.

Kuntz: Wow. Yeah. I was thinking about all the other technology, like, I have all my devices and then all the other people's devices in my home around me. And all of that is, kind of, activating and pinging at the same time.

Thatcher: Mm-hmm. And all of that exacts the mental toll on you, right? You can feel less satisfied in what you're doing, even if you're doing it really well, because it's just too much. It can make you feel more tired and a little bit more burnt out in the moment or over time because you're juggling all these competing things you never used to have to do. Or, there's a contrasting view that's starting to emerge that says, actually, it's really not so bad because it lets you do more. So, you, rise to the challenge.

Kuntz:��So, productivity, in contrast, with maybe emotional or wellness state.

Thatcher: Absolutely. And what we think in that particular space, and this is, like, a new area that people are just starting to look at, that in the short-term challenge is great, but in the long term, it's just as bad as feeling overloaded, because you're always on and people need downtime to feel well.

Kuntz: Well, so, how did you and your colleagues go about studying this? And what did you find?

Thatcher:��So, what we got really interested in, it was that a lot of research was out looking at individual facets of technostress. And it was contradictory sometimes. Sometimes, they were finding, like, stress was bad. Sometimes, it was good. Sometimes, it was much worse than others.

We asked ourselves, we're looking at all these different pieces of stress and isolation, and we're arguing that stress A plus stress B plus stress C plus stress D and pick your different kind of stressor would lead to a certain outcome. Like, it was additive. And what we recognized was that it wasn't that simple. And what you had to really think through was not just stress in general, but how you combine the different forms of stress that would result in how you felt in terms of satisfaction, life, wellness, burnout, and whatnot.

So, what we did in this study was we took a different view. Instead of saying A leads to B, we asked the question of do combinations of A plus B plus C lead to the stress? So, is it, am I getting too many messages? I'm getting too many conflicting messages, and I lack control over when I get them? Okay. Does that result in a much worse outcome than when I have control? So, I can define when I get those messages, and that helps me manage the workload.

We were really interested in, like, this core set of five variables that are looked at in technostress, like, techno invasion, techno complexity and whatnot, and how combinations of those led to job satisfaction and burnout.

And what was really cool about the study was that we found that, for every person, it's not the same. So, it's different combinations of stress that result in different outcomes to different people. And this was actually a really important thing, even though it's a very simple finding, right? Because what it lets you think about as a manager is, okay, what do I need to give my employee to manage the specific set of things that they're facing that result in them feeling more or less stressed out?

Kuntz: Can you think of two different examples of people and what was stressful to them?

Thatcher:��So, one really great example that you'll see out there comes from Mercedes. And what Mercedes did for a period of time was they said no email on the weekend, because there were, you know, people feeling overloaded, feeling invaded and whatnot. And what they did was they said, “Okay, here's the rule. Everyone steps away from their computer on the weekend.” Okay. And they found, for some people, that was awesome, right? But for other people, like, who had sales jobs and managerial jobs and whatnot, they were totally stressed out when they went to work on Monday because all of the things that they would have done minor maintenance on over the weekend built up.

Kuntz: Yeah. They're, like, five or 10 things you might do. All of a sudden, they have to do those along with everything Monday and everyone's concerns, yeah.

Thatcher: Absolutely. So, they figured out, you know, you do an adjustment. And the adjustment is that for some people on some types of jobs, yeah, you turn off email. And generally speaking, we don't do email on the weekend. But for certain people in certain categories, and this is where the manager becomes important, right? They identify who needs to be available so that they can be effective come Monday. And you give them the flexibility to fit those technologies into their words so that they can feel good about what they're doing and they feel less burnt out.

Kuntz: Yeah. That flexibility and personalization, it's key and it's challenging.

Thatcher: Absolutely. And it's only gotten harder. Like, the research that was done with Mercedes, it was done in a factory, right? Where everybody comes and goes from one place. Now, you move to the world we have right now, where we're all sitting in different locations, we're doing different things, we have different interruptions. If you're going to work in that world, this question of how do you let people manage that stress that's introduced by technology, or how do you manage the interplay between where they're working and the technology, that's going to take some really tough choices.

Kuntz: Yeah, and I think, even, about time zones. I mean, there's so many global teams now where it's not the same time for everyone and they're trying to get work done with the same deadline

Thatcher: With the same deadline, with the same requirements for quality, with sometimes a boss that doesn't quite understand because they're not used to navigating timelines. And some of that I think has become more complicated, even though my study was done mostly before COVID. But, you know, we have real challenges because, during COVID, people went 100 different ways. And for really smart technical knowledge workers, to get access to them, often, we're not demanding they come back to the office. And some of those challenges that we're seeing occur right now in many companies where they're asking people to come back, it's because they can't navigate all these different things with technology very well, if were not co-located.

Kuntz: Even the highest tech companies are bringing people back to work right now.

Thatcher: Yeah, absolutely. So, Amazon's brought people back. Google's talking about it. There's some companies that, when all of this started, they said they weren't going to people back. And I'm really, kind of, anxiously waiting to see what they do.

Kuntz: Well, let's go back a little to technostressors. How did you see technostressors working in combination to affect people? And were there certain demographics more likely to feel the impacts versus others?

Thatcher: What we found was really interesting. Often, the interaction between these things — the lack of control, the intrusion and whatnot — what they would do is that they would affect how satisfied or how burned out I was.

The three things that we found that were most prominent consistently across people, okay, was that feeling of overload, like, you get an overwhelming number of tasks and information delivered by technology. That stress people out pretty consistently. Not a shock, right? But the second piece that was really interesting, when you think about people working from home, we found that when technology kept people constantly connected. And it blurred that feeling of work and life. That diminished people's ability to detach from work. And that made them stressed out. And then the third thing that we found, that when technologies were too complex, so people aren't really well trained, it hasn't been explained how to do simple things with hard to do stuff. And I'm old. So, think of this as when I'm asked to do, like, mail merge. Back in the old days, it’s hard word, right?

Kuntz: Yeah. Yes.

Thatcher: People found that stressful. So, when you have those three pieces in our operating, people are much less happy, much lower levels of job satisfaction, and eventually, we think much more likely to leave their jobs.

Kuntz: Yeah, that new technology piece, I mean, that's such an interesting intersection of change management and technology stress or technostress. Because if you're introducing a new software to a team, a new platform, everyone's got to learn that. And along with it comes this whole system of notifications and file management, you know, how you interact with the software and how that interacts with everything else that you've already, sort of, architected around you.

Thatcher: Yeah, because you've built out routines, right? And you have a way of doing things and we don't always talk about it, but those habits and routines in our daily life make everything a little easier because you don't think, you just get it done. And then, you have these technologies where you have interruptions, you have constant shifting, you have family life coming into work, work life coming into family life. Suddenly, right, it feels not manageable. And that constant shifting, that change, makes it a lot harder to cope with interruptions and stress.

Kuntz:��So, based on these findings, how might managers or companies go about trying to address technostressors?

Thatcher:��So, the first thing to think about is that we think it's really important for managers to recognize. You can't just address one problem. I can tell everybody, no email after five, go home and relax. That doesn't work for everyone. I can't tell everybody, don't turn on your phone at work and take messages from your family, that intrusion from life to work, that's a recipe for disaster, right? You really have to think about the whole job and the whole person when you're thinking about how to help them manage stress, okay? So, that's our first big piece. Really assess what's going on with the person, understanding what stressors are impacting them, have a dialogue with people. Understand your specific workplace.

The second thing that we encourage people to think about is, even though I'm saying there's not one-size-fits-all for communication strategies, it's nice to have a communication strategy. We all need a set of expectations. One of the first things I do, I was a single dad, and I would go on my first week of class when my daughter was really small, and I said, look, from 5:00 to 9:00, I don't take messages.

And it was great because all my students understood that. And what I would tell managers is, say, look, it's okay if you don't read your emails from time to time, every night, you know, I don't expect you to be on all the time. But just check in once in the evening and commit to not emailing people late after hours.

Kuntz: Or schedule that send.

Thatcher: Or schedule at send, right. And I do that a lot, like, 8:00 a.m. was, like, a nightmare for my Ph.D. students because suddenly there's this flooded stuff. But the schedule is sent. So, have a clear policy of when people should check in. So, they know what they don't have to worry in the back of their head, “Oh, this message might've come in,” or, “Oh, I don't feel like I need to be at work all the time.” Because people really need to feel like they're not at work sometimes. Like, that's really healthy.

A third thing that we think people should think about is, you know, it's actually not a bad idea to think about how to use the technology to limit stress. Schedule send is one. You'd be surprised when you talk to people how many people don't know how to schedule. And actually just proactively show people how to do it. And one thing that we've learned anecdotally, not through research, but just talking to people, is when the organization schedules a session that says, “Hey, we're going to show you how to do X, Y, or Z. So, schedule send. Put your phone in sleep mode or airplane mode, whatever,” what it does is it unlocks giving people the permission to control when they communicate. So, show them how to use the tools and how to think about it. And that, what you'll first start seeing is they'll start developing better hygiene in terms of how they interact through technology. As long as they know, “I've got to check once in a while,” right? And so, that's pretty healthy.

And then the final thing that we think that every organization really needs to think through is leaders got to be trained. Managers aren't trained on how to manage in a digital world. I'm 53. Okay. I remember my first internship getting my first email address. There are a lot of people like me who grew up in a time where email was a novelty. Sure, we use it. But we're not quite digital natives and really being trained and understanding what are the new tools people are using, how they're communicating, what people expect, especially what young people expect, and what older people are willing to do. That really takes some time to develop the leadership skills to work in a hybrid world.

Kuntz: In a multi-generational world.

Thatcher: In a multi-generational world. And that's the thing, like, much of what I see in the practitioner press is talks about managing the next generation, okay. But, you know, the boomers aren't gone. Gen X, we have a bad attitude. We're still around. The millennials are turning 40. And yeah, they grew up with these tools, but each of us has… each individual, but also each generation has had a different lived experience.

So, really take the time to develop your skills to be a digital leader in the workplace. That often means knowing when not to send, how to have the conversation, when to actually dial versus text. Like, if you look, I have a 20-year-old daughter and anyone that has a 20-year-old will tell you, you can't call them. They don't pick up.

Kuntz: No. It creates anxiety, is what I've heard from a lot of folks.

Thatcher: Right. They think that the world is ending. It's like you're calling to somebody's dad. It's usually what my daughter says, “Who died?”

Kuntz: Oh.

Thatcher: It's really terrible because they're not used to phones. They're used to just a simple text message, which is also interesting because my generation, I find all of us in that 40s, 50s range, we get messages and we tend to reply quickly. But this next group that's coming up right now are freshmen, sophomores, juniors in college. They don't reply quickly all the time. They look at it as, “I can reply when I'm ready to.” That final prescription, right? Is managers need to take the time to become educated, learn these different styles, and think about how do you craft policies that fit the kind of jobs you're managing?

Kuntz: And really the individuals who are specifically on your team.

Thatcher: Yeah. There's a little bit of customization. But there's also got to be some consistency. And that's a management skill, right? Thinking through reasonable policies. You know, and if you can do those things right, like, be aware of the stress you're creating, being aware of what boundaries to set and how to set them, how to tailor it to fit the character and the personality of your team as a group, you're going to be okay.

Kuntz: I'm fascinated and thinking so many things that I'm going to take back to my workplace. So, for the employees on the other end, there's only so much they can control, but what are the ways individuals can effectively address and mitigate technostressor factors?

Thatcher: One thing people forget is you do have a right to turn your phone off. And on your side as an employee, it's okay to say, you know, like, “I do with my students when I have a small child at home. Here are the times that I'm doing this. Here's when I will reply.” And if people know what to expect on the management side, they tend to be okay with it. I can't tell you how many times I've been in a meeting with a manager, with a professor, with a student, and they'll say, “Okay, let me send this person a message really quickly.” And then they go, “But don't worry. They typically take 30 minutes to respond.” And I'm sure you've had meetings, like, that, too, right? And it's because the person has set a boundary of, “Here’s when I reply to messages.”

So, if you're a kid and you're just starting out, don't make it a best practice to respond immediately. Make it a best practice of thinking about, “Okay, when am I going to consistently respond? Be measured in that response.” And that will help train the people around you around what's okay and what's not okay. Now, managers may not always like that, right? There may need to be a conversation if you don't respond quickly enough, but if you're responding very quickly all the time, you're setting yourself up for a lot of techno intrusion and a lot of stress.

So, that would be one thing I would encourage employees to do. The second thing I'd encourage an employee to do, particularly a new one, learn the roles for communication. I had this wonderful fellowship in Denmark one summer. And it was really interesting. Like, in the States, we're on 24/7, like, and I'm telling everybody to be measured and whatnot, but I'm not living the way I'm preaching.

And so, I go to this, my fellowship in Denmark and I'm sending these emails on Saturday, and I'm like, “Okay, let's do this. Let's be ready to work Monday morning.” My boss sat me down Monday morning. She goes, “You know, Jason, it's not very polite to ask people to do things on the weekend.” And I had to really learn to pay attention to the communication pattern where I worked, because the way of working in that place was so different than what I knew.

And I think it's really important if you're going to manage these technologies, particularly these communication technologies, learn the rules of the game where you work. And if you do that, it's a lot easier because you'll be less impatient. If people are emailing you all the time or not at all, you'll understand the rhythm of the work, when to ask for work, and you'll also learn what kind of content's okay and what's not.

Kuntz: You know, it really, for me, highlights the fact that every workplace, every team is a culture unto its own.

Thatcher: Absolutely.

Kuntz:��And so, you're really learning the culture and the communication style and how to adapt and thrive in it.

Thatcher: And a lot of these problems, while technology may provide the feature that stresses you out, it's the person at the other end of the communication that's actually stressing you out, right? So, you have to learn to manage the people that's part of that process.

Kuntz: That's a good segue into this question. What do you think are the biggest barriers to moving the needle on how stressed out so many of us are by technology in the workplace?

Thatcher: I think one of them actually is we're used to being stressed out now. Like, most people I talk to, if you don't reply all weekend but you send an email Friday at 5:00, and if you don't have a reply by Monday, you've forgotten what you emailed about. It's happened to me a few times. I think one of the barriers is really establishing, like, healthy patterns for your communication because we're habitually, this came into our lives, none of us were trained. We set up these high speed 24/7 cultures. We said, “Hey, go work anywhere you want to,” but that tax for that was be available all the time.

We've got to change that culture. We've got to become much more mindful, a little bit slower, so people can get that reflection and the release from constant pressure, so that they can actually do good work. Because what we know is, if you're not super busy all the time, you feel better and you do higher quality work and you're much more satisfied.

So, my second point is, we actually need to think much more carefully about what we communicate about. Not everything needs to be an email, but everything needs to be a text message. And something that I do these days is I actually keep a notepad next to my desk and I'll write down, “Okay, send an email about this in 20 minutes.” And usually, 20 minutes later, I've answered the question myself. One of the problems that we have right now is it's so easy to reach out, we just ask rather than figuring it out. And what I found was when I stopped sending those emails immediately, I got a lot fewer emails.

And so, you send fewer emails and actually my life hasn't changed for the worse. So, you know, you, kind of, have to think through where that stressor is for you, right? And so, I think learning to regulate that, because it is just a habit to say, “Oh, I'll just send a quick text. Oh, I'll just send a quick email.” And then I think the fourth barrier, honestly, and I haven't done research on this — this is my gut intuition — I think we have too many online meetings. I went back and I looked at my calendar pre-COVID and post-COVID. Pre-COVID, I had four or five online meetings a week. These days, I have, like, 20.

Kuntz: I have four or five a day.

Thatcher: You're crazy. That's really stressful. And it may feel like it's not so bad because I can do it from my office, I can do it from the coffee shop, I can do it from my home, I can do it from my cabin in the mountains, but it's still four or five meetings a day.

Kuntz: Yeah.

Thatcher: And maybe you really need to ask, not just, do I need to have a message sent? Do I really need to have a meeting? And I really think, if we start managing those things, it's not that the technology is bad, it's how we're using it, and we ourselves are more purposeful in how we use those technologies and we create cultures that are a little bit more purposeful, we’ll all be okay. But it's going to take a little while, right? You think about the big picture of human history, it's thousands and thousands of years. We've only really had cell phones everywhere since, say, 1998. Text messaging wasn't really common till 2008, 2009.

So, we're still figuring this out. And I guess that would be my final prescription in terms of, like, how to make this better. Exercise a little forgiveness, sometimes. If you miss a message, usually, it's not the end of the world. They'll follow up. If you message too often, be self-aware enough to know, “Oh, you know, I used to send too many messages. I'm not doing it so much anymore.” Don't be embarrassed about it. It was just focused on the future and getting better. We're all still learning how to navigate this together.

The other one that I think, and I'm going to go a little off task here, so I hope the audience will bear with me, calendars. It used to be all of us, many of us shared calendars. And that's why Outlook Exchange is still used because it's, like, the premier calendaring function, right, in the world. But boy, now, you find calendars being used all sorts of different ways. And calendars themselves are pretty intrusive. So, take care to not over calendar yourself. Build into there those quiet spaces where you have time for yourself to pause and reflect during your workday. Like, you have five meetings a day. Build in there, like, one hour with a label that nobody knows that says, “This is me time. So, I can actually think and collect my thoughts.” So, nobody sticks into your calendar. Here's another technology mediated meeting or technology scheduled.

Kuntz: I block for lunch every day. I do try to take my midday, like, step away, put it down, not have my phone with me while I'm eating sometimes. But it's really good advice. I had a boss once who even told us, put a half an hour in your calendar every day for that quiet, creative reflection, so that you can do what you were saying. Collect your thoughts, synthesize things, and new ideas emerge.

Thatcher: And the one thing not to do, don't call it your quiet time or your lunch time, because people will schedule during that. You may be at the dentist every day. You may be at the doctor every day, right? But give it a title that people understand this is time we don't mess with. Like, even when my daughter was out of school, and I'll get in trouble for this, I used to in there, “time to pick up my daughter.”

Kuntz: Whatever works.

Thatcher: Right. Nobody calls you when you're in the drive-thru picking up your kid from elementary school.

Kuntz: True.

Thatcher: And I would get 45 minutes to actually just sit and get through all the emails or even though it wasn't no time away, but I could get through things and have a little relief from it.

Kuntz: I love that. All right. So, I have one final question. So, you have a pretty active online following. You have a lot of followers on LinkedIn. And could you share what your relationship with technostressors is and has your research changed any of your own behaviors around technology?

Thatcher:��So, do I feel technostressed? Sometimes.So, I have a pretty big presence footprint on LinkedIn. I've got about 50,000 followers. I get close to 30 million impressions a year. And what's hard with that is people that don't know me message me all the time, like, just out of the blue. And sometimes you respond and sometimes you don't. And I yeah, and there are times where it's not very good. So, what I've had to learn to do is when to turn off. I've learned to schedule. So, it may look like I'm up at 2:00 a.m. posting. Yeah. Sometimes that post was scheduled two weeks out.

I've had to really learn, through doing the social media stuff. And I do social media as outreach within the academic community because I feel a vocation that helps mentor young people mostly. But I've had to learn honestly to schedule when, to aside a certain amount of time, and when I'm out of time, that's it for the day.

Because it can really overtake you. And do I feel stressed? Yeah, sometimes I do. Like, sometimes I'll get a message from a young person that's like, “My advisor did X, Y, and Z, what should I do?” And those are actually not easy interruptions to take, but they're also not interruptions one can ignore. So, you have to address those things.

And then also there's a real power in just turning off. Like, before I take vacations, I schedule my posts and then that phone goes off for the week.

Kuntz: Great advice.

Thatcher: I think that what we're doing, right. And this is the great thing, even though I've fussed a lot in the podcast about technology. One of the nice things that it's also let us do is extend support and help each other. And one side of technostress is interruptions and gathering information and not great news. The other side is you can get great online social support. And if you're careful in who you talk to and what you post, you can find an awful lot of support out there.

Kuntz: Yeah, that's wonderful. Thanks for everything you've shared, Jason. It's been a great conversation. And I'm sure many of our listeners would like to, not if they're not already following you, they might want to follow you. You said you're on LinkedIn,

Thatcher: Yeah. So, the only thing I do is LinkedIn, really. And that was a conscious management strategy. If you want to find anything I have to say, mostly it's just boring professor stuff. But occasionally, there are a few life hacks in there. But yeah, you'll find me on LinkedIn.

Kuntz: Awesome. Well, we will look for you there. Hopefully, listeners can carry some of this information into the new year if they're looking to improve their relationship to technostressors and work-life balance. This has been such an interesting conversation. And I really appreciate you joining us today, Jason. Thank you.

Thatcher: Thank you so much for having me. It's been such a pleasure.

Kuntz: Thank you again for listening to Leeds Business Insights. Make sure you’re one of the first to hear every episode by subscribing to this show wherever you get your podcasts.

Leeds Business Insights Podcast is a production of the Leeds School of Business and is produced by University FM. We’ll see you next time.