Digital Wellbeing: The link between personal positivity and professional productivity

Guest writer for our thought leadership series is Beth Kerr - coach and consultant within the wellbeing, education and digital landscape for organisations.

Intuitively, most people have a sense of what wellbeing feels like. The dictionary describes it as ‘the state of being comfortable, healthy or happy’, though of course, other adjectives are also available….? ‘flourishing, thriving, content’ etc often making it into snappy definitions on company websites.

There is universal agreement that wellbeing is a good thing, that companies should care about it, that it should be ‘prioritised’, and indeed, you will be hard pushed to find many organisations that don’t reference it somewhere in their ‘Work for Us’ bumph.

However, for me, the most important part of the concept of wellbeing is not the definition but rather understanding the things that contribute to it; only then can one affect changes that will improve physical and mental health and support progress towards personal and professional goals.

While there is not a definitive list, it seems sensible to be guided by evidence and research, and with that proviso, I would highlight the following:

Sleep, Diet, Exercise and Relationships – with self, with others, and with the world.

If we get adequate and restful sleep, if we eat a nutritious and balanced diet, if we are regularly and consistently active and if we foster meaningful and empathetic relationships with ourselves, those around us and our environment, then we are proactively enhancing our wellbeing.

Nuance, context and individuality are of course key to all of these contributors – a lack of sleep due to work stress feels worse than a lack of sleep because you were dancing at your daughter’s wedding all night, but in general, they provide a helpful structure towards a healthier, happier and more productive life. ?They also help an organisation be more strategic about improving staff ‘wellbeing’, which can feel like a somewhat nebulous and overwhelming goal. For example, it is more straightforward to pinpoint the way poor sleep impacts productivity/ the quality of relationships in the office and target that specifically, rather than grappling with how a suboptimal feeling of health in your employees is impacting company performance.

So, if that is ‘wellbeing’ in a nutshell, what exactly is ‘digital wellbeing’ and why is it relevant to you and your company?

Digital Wellbeing

‘Digital wellbeing is about crafting and maintaining a healthy relationship with technology. It’s about how technology serves us and moves us towards our goals, rather than distracting us, interrupting us or getting in the way.

Being in control of technology enables us to use its full potential and gain all the benefits of it. It is a state of satisfaction that people achieve when digital technology support their intentions’ – Google

I think these descriptions of digital wellbeing are helpful and clearly convey a vision of utopia where technology and humanity work in perfect harmony, and where individuals are the pilots not passengers of their own digital use - in pursuit of their goals, in work and at home.

However, I am not sure if you are human, how consistently you operate in this state …without being interrupted or distracted. Most individuals and organisations report that their attention often gets hijacked, and that this is often to the detriment of their work or their relationships…. even though those TikTok cat videos are sometimes very funny!

In this article, we are looking at how digital wellbeing supports personal positivity and professional productivity, so let’s connect the dots.

If digital wellbeing is ‘a state of satisfaction that people achieve when digital technology support their intentions’, we need to understand:

1.???? How the contributors to wellbeing are impacted by digital technology and then how they relate to those intentions.

2.???? How this interplay underpins and connects both personal positivity and professional productivity.

3.???? How we differentiate between employee digital agency and responsibility versus corporate digital agency and responsibility

It may be easier to bring these points to life with some examples – if your employee intends to go to bed early yet ends up scrolling through emails late into the night, digital technology has not supported their intention to have restful sleep. Consequently, the next day, an employee may struggle to regulate their emotions at breakfast, leading to an argument with their spouse before they leave the house; they then arrive at work upset and somewhat distracted. Furthermore, they are cognitively compromised, as memories of what they learnt yesterday have not properly been consolidated overnight, resulting in sub-optimal ability to do their job. They are also not as good at perceiving emotions in others, resulting in a frosty team meeting, and of course, when they return home, they are even more emotionally dysregulated, and feeling frustrated at a poor day at the office…I’m sure we can all imagine what dinner with the family at said employee’s house is like that evening.

Sleep is a contributor that is likely to affect immediate changes to mood and work performance -in either direction, depending on whether the sleep is adequate and restful or insufficient and broken. Over time however, prolonged deficient sleep can result in more serious physical and mental health issues for an individual, which impacts every area of their lives, and will likely result in medical related absence from work. Identifying that sleep is an issue is the first step, but then why it is an issue is the second. If an employee is not sleeping because they are scrolling on TikTok, this is not the employer’s responsibility or fault. However, if they are answering emails from their boss, who tends to send them late into the night, and the employer thinks they need to respond swiftly, then they are playing a role in the reduction of sleep for the employee.

One could of course think of similar scenarios for other contributors to wellbeing - diet, physical activity and relationships etc. The difficulty however, lies in the blurring of boundaries between employer and employee – what is your responsibility, what is theirs? Is it ok for you to call out that you don’t think it’s great that X employee eats endless biscuits instead of a healthy lunch at their computer and doesn’t get any fresh air all day? It’s delicate and although probably comes from a good place, could definitely backfire!

Empowering employees themselves to question the relationship between their tech use, the contributors to their health and their overall assessment of how they are doing professionally and personally is beneficial for a number of reasons.

Firstly, it is difficult for employers to ask their employees, (however you dress it up) what is essentially this question - ‘are you sure you are working as efficiently as you can and aren’t getting distracted by your child’s class WhatsApp messages/scrolling/newsfeed alerts’? . This is unlikely to receive an honest or productive response, and indeed may well lead to the employee feeling judged, defensive or alienated.

It is also clear from the evidence that the way we use tech varies hugely and what supports, or scuppers work, or wellbeing intentions is really individual. It is why hard and fast ‘tech-rules’ rarely work, and why we are better to look at developing principles that underpin the culture we want and allow the employee to look honestly at their digital habits (without the fear of their boss using it against them).

And finally, we know that good quality relationships are the bedrock of wellbeing and success in all areas of life (Harvard Study of Adult Development) Appreciating this, valuing this, and putting time into understanding how technology impacts our business relationships, can help organisations develop digital habits in the workplace that support productive and fulfilling environment and culture.

What does this last point look like in practice - and what does it actually help with?

Well, sometimes, we are all guilty of assuming others think like us, others perceive actions as we do, others understand what we are thinking…and how we use and communicate through technology is one area that can certainly divide people.

Let’s take intergenerational differences as an example -within any organisation, it is likely that you will have a range of employees, ranging from young whipper snappers to the more mature end of the market. The ‘ping pong guy’ – Matthew Syed, identified that in an interconnected world with increasingly challenging problems, collective diversity is fundamental to an organisation’s problem solving, creative thinking and subsequent success. Yet the narrative around tech use often polarises the young and older generations, depicting one group as technophobic dinosaurs and the other as empathetically inept. In my view, this is outdated, unhelpful and inaccurate, and while of course there are differences in how people interact with digital platforms, these differences enrich organisations… as long as they communicate effectively. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of high-quality communication within business, asking, not assuming. I recall a conversation with an investment banker who told of a young team member who was absolutely brilliant. The only problem was that his older colleagues and some account partners had begun to complain about ‘Jane’ because she never seemed to respond to emails promptly. He investigated this and saw it to be true, which confused him as in every other way, she really was the consummate professional. In the end, he took her out to lunch and asked her about it. Her response….’emails? I thought that’s what people sent when it you really didn’t need an urgent response, isn’t Teams messaging the thing to use when you want a response quickly?’. She had not grown up with a culture of jumping to reply immediately to emails, and no-one had told her that there was an expectation that emails were replied to within 24 hours, less with big clients. It was such a simple misunderstanding, and one that so easily could have been avoided by establishing clarity around digital perceptions and practices.

Such clarity doesn’t need to be a long-detailed policy, but just some basic principles that guide communication related to:

·?????? Team meetings

·?????? Zoom meetings

·?????? 1:1’s

·?????? Communal areas

·?????? Flexible working scenarios

·?????? Email and messaging.

They should be reached with collaboration from all representatives, stated simply and clearly, and relevant to your organisation, to your team.

This is just a very basic example that could of course link to values or rational, but thought it might be useful as a starter if your company doesn’t have such a document:

We all benefit, and suffer from our interaction with tech. Sometimes, we feel the strain of 'always-on' work cultures, sometimes we have a sense of discomfort, guilt, knowing that our tech use is impacting our wellbeing or worse, the people we care about outside of the office. Very few of us are able to disconnect different elements of our lives, separate them into neat little boxes and consequently, it is inevitable that personal positivity and professional productivity are symbiotically related. Therefore, if you as a leader can make changes to improve both individual agency and corporate culture relating to digital wellbeing, then you will please everyone – except perhaps those invested in the attention economy…but given that it made a staggering $853 billion in global net advertising revenue in 2023 alone, I think they can probably afford it!

Thank you and full credit for this thought leadership article goes to Beth Kerr - wellbeing, education and digital coach and consultant. Beth’s focus is on empowering people to have agency over their wellbeing and digital habits and helping organisations in this quest. Connect with Beth on LinkedIn here Beth Kerr.

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