The Hidden Upside of Tech Challenges
MIT Sloan Management Review ·
Alice Mollon/Ikon Images
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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
Many hindrances are obvious and simple to eliminate. Technology that is unreliable and malfunctions frequently, for example, should be upgraded or simply replaced.
Only after hindrance stressors, such as invasive distractions and constant connectivity, have been reduced should leaders focus on positively challenging employees with technology to boost their job satisfaction and performance.
For example, leaders can modify roles to require a broader, more complex set of IT functionalities and technological skills, and give employees extra time to learn and develop new abilities. They can also deliberately provide tech challenges that allow employees to develop special expertise in mainstream office applications, such as SAP or Microsoft Excel, or update the IT infrastructure to include applications and devices that can help employees improve their work methods and become more innovative. Recognizing employees for adopting new technologies and involving them in technology change and implementation can also have a positive effect.
Another action leaders can take is nurturing a culture that encourages employees to proactively explore and experiment with new technologies. Informal meetings, such as brown bag lunches, are a great way for teams to share knowledge about new applications in a relaxed setting, as are videos that employees create themselves and share on enterprise channels. Giving employees the opportunity to request changes to the features of these applications or suggest different tools entirely can help them feel more involved in the process of choosing workplace applications. This can cultivate a sense of ownership and empowerment.
If ambivalence lingers, leaders can help employees in two main ways. The first is to offer ample IT support and guidance. Few leaders have the resources available to employ more help desk personnel, but specialized software, such as NinjaOne, provides fully integrated tools to manage the entire help desk support process, including functions for IT ticket management, problem resolution, collaboration, and documentation. Such tools can help address current IT issues while employees build an internal knowledge base and, by helping them resolve hindrances faster, achieve greater efficiency and reduce their sense of ambivalence, even when resources are limited.
Another way to help reduce ambivalence is by investing more in IT training and coaching initiatives. An especially cost-effective approach is the use of self-paced online learning platforms, which are designed to make the learning experience fun while users develop skills in using complex workplace applications. Leaders can subscribe to these platforms or simply encourage employees to access them. Microsoft Learn, for example, features hundreds of training modules covering topics ranging from basic applications to advanced prompt engineering. Likewise, the SAP platform offers hundreds of what it calls Learning Journeys, and Salesforce provides free access to its training tool, Trailhead, which features hundreds of pathways for learning how to solve practical problems through step-by-step guides.
The most effective approach to addressing ambivalence, however, is to establish a mentorship program that pairs employees with expert users who can provide system-related advice and on-the-job coaching. Compared with virtual or video training formats, mentorship is more informal, friendly, and specifically focused on individuals’ particular needs. 12 Mentoring can make employees feel more comfortable about seeking advice, especially when they are frustrated by the dual role of technology as a negative hindrance and a positive challenge at once.
For employees to grow through challenges rather than be hampered with technical inconveniences, leaders must carefully consider the tech stressors new tech can impose. Optimally — and contrary to conventional wisdom — leaders should reduce unproductive hindrances before increasing the number, frequency, and complexity of constructive challenges. Effective leaders pay close attention to the role that ambivalence plays in their employees’ stress levels and, by extension, their well-being, performance, and quiet-quitting or resignation rates.
The cost of getting this wrong is measured not just on an individual level. It also shows up as licenses paid for never-used tools, enterprisewide transformation programs that stall, and strategies that fail not because of technology but due to limited workforce capacity. Eliminating hindrances and offering new challenges can increase employees’ abilities, engagement, and drive.