Info overload or drought leaves digital workers stressed out

Conversations about the impact of digital working were perhaps most common during lockdown — but, even now, more and more of us are relying on remote working technology to get our jobs done. This can provide lots of benefits, including increased flexibility and productivity. But there are downsides too.

A new study focuses on a rarely discussed downside: the fear of missing out, also known as FOMO. Writing in Sage OPEN, the University of Nottingham's Elizabeth Marsh, Elvira Perez Vallejos, and Alexa Spence explore how FOMO can arise through digital working — and how this can affect our mental health.

Participants were 140 adults aged between 25 and 44, the majority of whom were women. They were presented with a number of statements related to different downsides of work and asked how much they applied to their experiences.

The first was overload, measured by statements such as "I am overwhelmed by the amount of information I have to process on a daily basis." Next, participants responded to measures on digital anxiety ("I hesitate to use digital workplace applications for fear of making mistakes I cannot correct.") and fear of missing out ("When working in the digital workplace… I worry that I might miss important work-related updates"), as well as stress, exhaustion, and general mental health.

As you might expect, all digital workplace demands had positive correlations with workplace stress: the more under pressure people felt, the more stressed they were, regardless of what kind of pressure that was.

Some factors had a greater mental health impact, however. Feeling overloaded with information, or like one might be missing out on it, were both particularly detrimental to workers' general wellbeing and levels of stress.

"To help people cope with information overwhelm," Marsh notes, "serious and sustained attention should be given to both optimising information management and supporting information literacy."

The authors suggest that workplaces should think carefully about how much information workers should be expected to consume — for example, do they really need to check the intranet every day, be a member of 15 different Teams channels, keep up with group chats and emails, and do their normal job on top of this? Can information be streamlined to ensure people aren't overwhelmed? Taking such steps might also relieve FOMO: if you're constantly overwhelmed with information, it can be easy to feel like you can't keep up and therefore like you're missing out.

The team also points out that there may be a flipside to this. While some workers are "hyperconnected" and therefore overloaded with information, others may experience "information poverty", unable to access the information they need. The impact of this could also be interesting to explore in future efforts to better understand the psychological impact of digital working.

Read the paper in full:

Marsh, E., Elvira Perez Vallejos, & Spence, A. (2024). Overloaded by Information or Worried About Missing Out on It: A Quantitative Study of Stress, Burnout, and Mental Health Implications in the Digital Workplace. SAGE Open, 14(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440241268830