How to Manage Technology for a Healthier Work Environment

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Ever wondered what drives our seemingly endless engagement with digital tools at work?

Cyberpsychology expert Carolyn Freeman joins us to shed light on this phenomenon and shares her personal journey from the corporate world to cyberpsychology, triggered by her own experiences with digital burnout.

Gain insights into how technology influences our behavior, mental health, and productivity, and learn effective strategies to manage digital stress in the workplace.

Carolyn offers valuable perspectives on mastering technology instead of letting it control you.

Balancing work and personal life has never been more challenging, especially in creative environments.

Discover the significance of managing work-home boundaries and how being constantly connected through emails and messaging platforms can heighten stress levels and impact team dynamics.

Whether you strictly separate work from personal time or blend the two, understanding and embracing your unique work style is essential for maintaining mental health and productivity.

As the workplace evolves, so do our needs for flexibility. Explore varying perspectives on hybrid and remote work and how organisational culture and leadership play crucial roles in implementing successful flexible work policies.

Learn to recognize signs of burnout and practical advice on managing technology use to maintain well-being.

By tailoring work arrangements to fit both individual preferences and team needs, we can create a more supportive and productive work environment. Carolyn explains how to do this. And, she has a special offer for a few lucky people!

Tune in for a thought-provoking discussion that addresses the complexities of modern work life and see how you can enhance the way you use technology.

Connect with Carolyn on LinkedIn
Visit Carolyn at Cybercology

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to episode 56 of Leading People with me, Gerry Murray. This episode is brought to you by Wide Circle, helping you make better talent decisions. To learn more, visit widecircleeu. That's W-I-D-E-C-I-R-C-L-E dot E-U. C-i-r-c-l-e dot E-U.

Speaker 1: 0:27

In this episode, we're diving into the fascinating world of cyber psychology with expert Carolyn Freeman. Have you ever wondered how technology shapes our behavior at work or how we can manage digital stress to prevent burnout? Carolyn brings us her unique insights based on her journey from the corporate world to cyber psychology. In this episode, you'll discover how technology affects our mental health and productivity, the balance between being a master of technology versus being enslaved by it, and practical strategies for leaders to help their teams manage technology effectively. So, without further ado, let's dive right in and learn how to navigate the digital world for better personal and professional well-being.

Speaker 1: 1:16

Carolyn Freeman, welcome to Leading People, Thank you. It's great to be here. So a mutual friend and a former guest on Leading People, Dee Clayton. She introduced me to your work and I'm sure that our listeners out there are very curious to learn more about the world of cyber psychology and how it relates to the world of work and leadership. But first, how did you get here? What was there? A person, place or an event that stands out in your journey to where you are today, or was there an epiphany moment and why did you choose a career in cyber psychology?

Speaker 2: 1:56

um, well, I actually started off in corporate marketing and spent 15 years doing branding and advertising. Um, and it's kind of it's where I met Dee. We worked together on Jeremy Dodgers and I got to my late thirties and with all the technology that was introduced during the course of my career went from a standalone desk computer through to laptops and mobiles and I found myself constantly being available for work and working every hour of the day and night and in my late 30s I just burnt out. So I left corporate marketing because I just knew I couldn't go back into that constantly, always on, always available lifestyle and I decided to pursue psychology because one of my favorite things in marketing was consumer behavior. So I wanted to understand more about psychology and kind of get into that for a career.

Speaker 2: 2:47

So I did an undergrad at the Open University in the UK in psychology and then I stumbled across cyber psychology.

Speaker 2: 2:54

It was someone actually in cybersecurity who mentioned that word to me and I was immediately fascinated and went straight home and Googled cyber psychology and then stumbled across a number of or a couple of cyber psychology books and that was me hooked, and because I've got a great love of technology and a great love of gadgets but, um, so to be able to combine my love of psychology and human behavior about why we do things and technology for me was a perfect mix, and so I did a master's, a research master's in cyber psychology at Buckingham University, which I finished I actually did it during.

Speaker 2: 3:30

The first lockdown was when I started my research and finished in the mid-2021. So it was three years ago when I finished my master's and I specialised in adult technology use, for the simple reason that no other cyber psychologist was looking at that as a speciality. Although they do look at various aspects of us using technology as adults, they don't look at it from a workplace perspective, because part of my research project and why I chose a subject I did was because I wanted to understand the role technology played in my stress and heightened anxiety and eventual burnouts in the corporate environment. So that's kind of how I got to this point and why I'm so passionate about adult technology use in the workplace and its impact on digital health.

Speaker 1: 4:21

So we're going to basically, for listeners, we're going to start to explore this, However. So now I'm pretty sure some of our listeners might be saying to themselves well, we all know about how technology impacts our lives. It's what to do about it that challenges us. However, in your forthcoming book because there's one of the reasons you're here is because there's a book coming out later in the year, we hope right You're going to argue that it's not really the technology itself, but the human elements that are really the driver. So perhaps as a starter, to kind of frame our conversation, maybe you could start to unpack that and then we'll get a little bit into what is cyber psychology and all the factors that are coming into play here, and at the end, I believe, we're going to have something special for our listeners and we'll get there eventually. Okay, so talk to us about this idea that it's not always just the technology, but it's the human elements. What do we mean by that? What do you mean by that?

Speaker 2: 5:15

So there's a concept in cyber psychology which looks at whether or not technology is a master of us, so we basically are enslaved to it and we just react to every single notification and email that comes in. And the other side is that we have agency over technology, so we are the masters of it, and those two sides of the argument is a fiercely debated thing within cyber psychology. But from a adult perspective. We use our gadgets because we are driven by our underlying needs in the workplace. So if we have a need or if we have a fear of missing something important, then we're more likely to check our emails at 11 o'clock at night. If we work for an international company, If we have a fear of not being seen because we work from home a lot and we don't feel like we're being seen to be productive we will often check our emails and check our messages to make sure that we're constantly signaling our productivity.

Speaker 2: 6:14

So the use of our gadgets and the use of our technology is driven from our own human need within a workplace culture and there are workplace cultures, there are workplace norms, there are underlying narratives that we have in the workplace that drives the need to engage through digital media and digital media and technology and emails is how we actually do business now, and especially amongst knowledge workers and I use the phrase knowledge workers as someone who uses their knowledge to create products and services that add value and make the company money and because we don't produce gadgets and widgets.

Speaker 2: 6:54

Our knowledge is what we provide and what we add value and how we signal the fact that we are worth the company keeping. So if there's a downsizing that they're not going to get rid of us, if we are showcasing that we're part of a team environment, then we're more likely to be a part of the end group. So there's psychological needs that we have as workers in a business that drive how we engage with our technology, and that's really the human element behind our technology. It uses individual, it's very needs-based and it's proving who I am within a corporate environment and that I add value and I'm worthwhile keeping.

Speaker 1: 7:41

Enjoying the insights and inspiration. Make sure to catch every episode by subscribing to Leading People on your favorite podcast platform, and please take a moment to rate us. Your feedback makes all the difference. Remember to follow us on our social media channels and join our LinkedIn group for more content and connection with like-minded professionals. Stay connected, stay informed and let's grow together.

Speaker 1: 8:13

That's a fascinating introduction and, if you can permit me, I'm going to just take your concept about the knowledge worker there. I mean, mean, as you say, that FOMO idea, the sort of um productivity signaling, you know, natural reactions to, to and and the technology is a way for us to to do that. Um, I, I listen to a lot of podcasts, I do a lot of work with hr technology and and and data analytics and that, yeah, I'm listening to a lot of people in that space. An interesting thing the other day I was listening to somebody who's quite advanced in his thinking on use of technology and really advancing, and he works for a manufacturing company and it was an interesting distinction he made, which was in manufacturing we don't see displacement of labor as the biggest thing. With AI, for example, we see it as an enabler and then we have to figure out how to do it, because we make classic widgets and I mean factories are geared up with huge investment in asset and machinery and technologies and that it's not easy for them to pivot, whereas in the in the knowledge working space, where we create things with software or with some sort of experiences in that, there must be a heightened awareness of the potential threat of the, the ai machine or roller coaster that's going on at the moment.

Speaker 1: 9:44

And what, what did you mean? Okay, the AI revolution, revolution, revolution, whatever you call it, is kind of been evolving. Chatgpt has given it a catalyst. It's been around before, that there's a lot of AI enabled stuff in our phones, and that for a long time, but at the same time it's now gathered a lot of momentum. What, what, what is? What are you hearing or reading or seeing out there? Is that distinction fair? That in manufacturing there's a slightly different dynamic going on with use of technology and the whole AI thing, or can you talk to that?

Speaker 2: 10:16

I think there is a difference from the perspective that, if you're producing widgets, you still need humans to run the machines. Widgets, you still need humans to run the machines. You still need humans to get involved, because there's very little in the way that robotics can, and until we get cyborgs who are able to think like humans, I think we still have that as part of our basic need, as human intervention in a manufacturing process, in a work in a knowledge-based environment. Yes, there is a lot of moral panic around AI stealing jobs, but I think, from an AI perspective, ai is not able to understand human emotion and they're not able to project into the future, so they can't make those dynamic links and creative links that we can as humans. So, yes, there will be some element of job loss or part of a role that's lost to AI.

Speaker 2: 11:16

As per any innovation that we've seen over the past 100 years, there's been a number of people who've lost labor jobs in farmlands because tractors came in and took out a lot of labor and when computers came in, there was a lot of typing pools that disappeared, and so there will be an evolution in how we work and how we actually do our job, and that's a good thing, because we need to streamline how we do work.

Speaker 2: 11:47

We need to move along, but I think the way that AI will evolve over time may well be different to how we currently foresee it and how a lot of media potentially talk about AI taking jobs, and I think there's also going to be a lot of unintended consequences that we haven't projected yet.

Speaker 2: 12:07

Like any new innovation, there's always unintended consequences, like the introduction of the iPhone had specific purposes when it was introduced, and there's things that have happened since then that we didn't see back then. So I think, yes, there's a bit of a worry, but actually there's a lot of things to embrace within the whole world of ai and I think there is going to be um a much better way of working. But it's about not letting it run away with us. It's about being mindful of how we use ai, what we use it for, how we use it and how we adapt it into the working environment, and I think that's the thing with a lot of technology we take it on board without thinking about how it's going to work best for us as humans, and sometimes it takes over or seems to take over what we do and we kind of lose a bit of control, yeah.

Speaker 1: 12:59

Yeah, I'm reminded of some of the work that Margaret Heffernan is doing in this area, where she's talked about ensuring that you know, technology serves humans and not the other way around. So let's take that as a segue into what is cyber psychology and how is it relevant and important to understand how technology impacts us in the workplace.

Speaker 2: 13:21

OK, so cyber psychology is twofold. It's one about how our human behavior affects our technology use. So during the pandemic, for example, what was going on at the time made us scared. A lot of times. We want to escape from the reality of the panic that we felt and the fear that we felt. So a lot of people spent time gaming or spent a lot of time on social media to A escape from the fear that they felt or, b to connect, to get those human connections with others that they couldn't see. So our behavior and what happened in the outside world and our psychology affected our technology use. And it also looks at how our technology use then affects our human behavior and our psychology. So if we spend a lot of time on social media, we find that if we're scrolling through other people's feed, our self-esteem goes down and we can feel depressed and we can feel inadequate. If we're scrolling through our own social media feed, we see all the wonderful things we've done and all our friends, and it reminds us of our previous history, like we do when we're looking through photos, and so that affects us positively because we realize what a great life we have. So our technology use affects our human behavior as well as our human behavior, psychology affecting our technologies. So that's really in a nutshell what cyber psychology is and the reason it's so important.

Speaker 2: 14:43

Workplace is um across the board. There's a number of things. The one is about there's an increase in gaming amongst adults, especially males, and the impact that's having on people's ability to be productive and present, because presenteeism, as we know, is a massive issue within the within working environment and if your workers are gaming until three, four o'clock in the morning, sometimes five in the morning, come into work, they're not actually fully present. Productivity goes down um from a um kind of productivity sorry, from a productivity perspective in general. It's about are they multitasking on work tasks? That actually reduces their ability to focus and do deep work or be creative. And if we're constantly staring at our phone and we're not engaging a creative side of our brain, then that could inhibit our ability to get our job done properly.

Speaker 2: 15:40

If we're in a creative environment, or even if we've got to think of creative solutions, if we don't get enough time at the end of the day to recharge our energy levels, both physically, mentally and psychologically, we come into the workplace the next day exhausted because we haven't had a good night's sleep.

Speaker 2: 15:57

We haven't actually, um, we've been so stressed by our email that we got that we come into the workplace feeling stressed and anxious and it tends to lead us to a place of burnout. So, and then also then the human side of it, in terms of whether or not we we separate us or integrate us with our work and home life, and whether or not we have boundaries that we have in place between work and home, how we engage in remote and hybrid working with our technologies, what kind of gadgets we use, why we use them, whether or not we click on security or cyber security emails that actually compromise the company's internet system. So there's so many different elements of cyber psychology that impacts us from a business level, but also from a personal level and from a team level.

Speaker 1: 16:49

Okay, and you talked about I mean, we've mentioned the concept of emotion and earlier on about AI. You also then reflect on depending on what you look at on your, let's say, facebook feed, et cetera, it's going to affect your emotions. That probably goes, goes, it segues into a nice sort of thing we all seem to be working, uh, much longer hours and and not able to kind of switch off, as you started to refer to, but then we start feeling, as you said, kind of guilty, uh, about checking mails, uh, and people check their mails before they go to bed first thing in the morning, and I mean this can't be useful or helpful for people. This can't be good, can it? It can?

Speaker 2: 17:32

and it can't. It depends because we all individuals and the way that we operate in a work-home environment is so different, and you spoke earlier about FOMO. Now, we often talk about fear of missing out, but actually in a working environment, it's about fear of missing something important, and especially if we work in an environment that is an international organization, all people are constantly checking their emails or sending out messages on messaging platforms. If we're not engaging in that platform throughout the evening and are in our team, we can feel as though we are not being a good team player and it may be seen by others in the in the team, or perceived to be seen by others in the team, that you're not actually contributing to the workspace. But also, what happens if someone makes a decision at 11 o'clock at night on a messaging platform because they're based in america and it's two o'clock in the afternoon, does it mean that you actually then have no ability to input into that decision later on? Um, so yes, the other thing is that we are either segmenters or we integrate us, which I kind of briefly touched on in answering the last question. So there's two types of people, so we can.

Speaker 2: 18:44

Those who are segmenters are those who say, well, I like to work between 8 am and 5 pm and then I'm done, I'm absolutely done and I want to now. This is my home time and I need time to recoup my energy levels. And they can do that. Or they need to do that because they might have small children or elderly parents that need looking after, or they're studying part-time, or they've got a sports event or sporting stuff that they want to get involved with, so they need to switch off. But then there's those who like integrating. So those people who've got ADHD prefer to do integrative approaches. So those people who've got ADHD prefer to do integrative approaches. So they do blocks of time that are work and blocks of time that are personal, because it gives them time after an hour where they're fully focused. They need time to recoup those energy levels because they can't concentrate for eight hours solid. Or they've got young children that need specific times to focus on them, so they need to be, they need breakfast and then they need lunch and then they need dinner, and especially during school holidays. So those are integrators.

Speaker 2: 19:51

Those are people who start work at six and finish at 11, but actually they take chunks of time during the day to switch off from work and do home stuff and those who are integrators really struggle with work culture, environments that are separators, and they say, well, we're switching your phone off and you are not allowed to communicate at all after 5 pm and that's really stressful for them, and the reverse is also true.

Speaker 2: 20:16

So those people who say, well, I need to switch off at 5 and I can't look at my emails till the next day, and you have teams and cultures that actually need you to keep talking during the evening, while I might phone you at eight o'clock at night, that's very stressful for them. So there are people who will look at their emails at 11 o'clock at night, but that actually mitigates stress because they need to be able to say I know that I've got no emails that are hugely stressful or going to hit me at first thing eight o'clock on tomorrow morning and I'm just going to hit the ground in a in a panic. I would just need to clear out all those emails and make sure there's nothing stressful and then I can go to sleep and have a good night's sleep, because if I don't check my emails I'm actually going to feel more stressed because I don't know what's coming up the next day so it's the uncertainty factor which the brain doesn't like.

Speaker 2: 21:04

So exactly so. What I talk to people about is about understanding how you work best and owning it. So it's giving you back that agency of saying if you um check, if you need to check your email 11 o'clock at night, it's okay to do that, but make sure that others and if you're going to reply to it, make sure that others in your team know that this is how you manage your workload and you're not expecting an email. If you don't tell people that especially if you're a manager and you like to respond to emails 11 o'clock at night and you don't say to your team I'm going to respond to it, but please don't answer. It's just me, that's how I'm working, then your team members implicitly know that they don't, that you're not expecting response. That's just your way of coping and managing with work and home and all the other things you're juggling in your life.

Speaker 1: 21:54

Okay, I have some questions based on that um and um. Some of them might even be devil advocate questions on behalf of our listeners, of course. Of course Coming up. Carolyn shares some practical advice for leaders on how to accommodate individual technology preferences within their teams. Plus, she discusses the psychological impact of constant notifications and how to foster a healthier digital environment. So back to our conversation. What did integrators do before technology?

Speaker 2: 22:35

I think they shoehorned themselves into going into the office and working eight hours and then just came home exhausted. There are people who and I know, before we got laptops or generally got laptops back in the 90s and early 2000s, some of my friends took work home with them. So they would take files home with them and read them when they got home and that was part of the integrated strategy and during the course of the workday they would go have coffee or they would go have a cigarette break or they would go do something that actually took them away from that exhausting slog of of eight hours solid concentration. So they had different techniques and different ways of managing those energy levels and managing the way that they worked.

Speaker 1: 23:23

And then something you were kind of touching on a little bit is it seems to me this is a recipe for some issues and maybe even conflict in the team if, for example, the leader has, or the manager has, one style and most of the team have another style. I'm actually reminded of an incident. I was going back to 2011. I was working with a very big multinational and, um, a guy came in to take over the marketing department with about 25 people and he was like he probably was an integrator. I think he had either what do they call them? Blackberries, not blueberries, blackberries, we just eat a lot of blueberries. I sometimes think, but anyway, those things that, uh, what they call crack berries or whatever they call the people. And he was, and he went and he said I'm going to buy everybody, uh, I'm going to give everybody a phone. And they all went. We don't want one. And he was probably an integrator and they're all going.

Speaker 1: 24:20

When I leave here, I want to go home and I'm just curious what you've come across. And not only that, but what advice would you give people if people out there are going? Oh, holy shit, sorry for my friend, that's, that's my world I'm, I'm one and and or my I'm this and my team is the other. What, what have you come across and what would you start to advise a team that is going through that? How would they figure that out, and what are some of the things that you've seen that people do to kind of make that work?

Speaker 2: 24:49

um, I think from a um, from people that I've spoken to about all this one. I remember specifically someone saying to me with their team they thought they were really flexible and they implemented flexibility strategies within their team and the research, research that I'd done through COVID I'd actually sent this person my master's thesis because they wanted to read it and they said the thing that really jumped out of them, jumped out at them, is they thought being flexible was their perspective of flexibility. So their flexibility working style was one way and they thought that was the only way to do flexible working. And they realized from that that actually no, it's not. Everyone's got different perspectives and mindsets and viewpoints on what flexibility means. So as a manager and as a team, as individuals, we your perspective of what flexibility and integration and segmentation means is could be very different from someone else who has exactly the same vocabulary as you. So that's one thing to think about.

Speaker 2: 25:48

The other thing is a culture within an organization often has either one or the other and it's often a top-down approach. So if you've got someone in your organization who is rather top, no matter what the policies say in the organization, whether they say, well, we value work-life balance or we value flexibility or we value hybrid working. It's about the person at the top who has a perspective of this is how we work as an organization. And another person I spoke to who worked at a big corporate international bank, he was saying that the culture was very much about um, it's all you are always on, always available, no matter what, even though the company kind of spoke about a mental health and well-being and work-life balance. But for this person he was just he was saying um, that he was the buffer between the corporate culture and his team. So he was saying, well, he has to manage all these constant ways of or expectations, and then gave the team the ability to do either you are this, either you're a segmenter or an integrator. And then having those conversations with the team helped everyone to understand how they worked.

Speaker 2: 27:01

And I think that is the biggest thing is that when we don't talk about how best it is to work for us, everyone assumes that your way is the only way that actually works well. And even when we talk about work-life balance, we think of work-life balance as a 50-50. So we've got eight hours of work and eight hours of home. But that actually isn't how everyone or individual operates actually isn't how everyone or individual operates, and I often talk or only really talk about work, life, play balance, because life can sometimes be as hard as work and work can sometimes be part of your life and you love it and it's your life what you do. So, but how are we playing? Um? So that was a slight segue from all the other stuff I was going to tell you about, which is so within an organization.

Speaker 2: 27:45

I think, for those who are struggling within a culture that is potentially an integrative culture, but they like to have a segmented approach, it's really about having that conversation with your team and with your manager about how you prefer to work, why you prefer to work that way, and work out a way of doing things that actually fits within your framework of your life and your home environments and all the other things that are going on in a way that helps you to be most productive, because, at the end of the day, that's really what we want to be as an individual within our team, as well as what our company expects of us is increased productivity.

Speaker 2: 28:31

So, to have those conversations this, this is how I am most productive and this is how I can focus the most within this team, within my role and within the company expectations of my kpis and what I need to achieve and what my clients need from me. So the biggest thing is about communication, about understanding how you work best, communicating that with the team and communicating that with your manager and seeing if that is compatible in a way that can work best. Sometimes about shoehorning the way that you work into how a company needs you to work, because that's the way a company that the team operates and the service you provide. And sometimes it's about finding a job that actually fits within your working style. And the research shows that if you are a segmenter and you work within a separate company, that is the biggest stress, the biggest um stress, uh, initiator, um, because the way that you fundamentally prefer to work is so significant, significantly in contrast to the way the company expects you to work.

Speaker 1: 29:31

Yeah, so I I actually work. It's like I'm smiling because I worked with a ceo many years ago who was all about, you know, the work-life balance thing for his team in fact, I like to use the term in those days, life, work balance like as a potential contrast, and it was quite watching his behavior. He wanted them to have more of this and watching his behavior and that he was actually not helping it because he was basically on all the time. And then why weren't they responding? But one thing that sort of I'm hearing in this, and I think it's part of this ongoing debate where there has to be some obviously, boundaries on this but this idea that one-size-fits-all approach doesn't fit anybody well and having this like this is the way we've got.

Speaker 1: 30:19

You see it a lot with how many days in the office. You see it in hybrid, all these things and there has to be I'm talking to more and more people about this and they're kind of going. You have to look at what does the team need, what are the outcomes and outputs that team needs to create the outcomes, and then when do they need to be together, when can they do quiet work or whatever, and basically trying to work that through rather than saying this is company policy. What have you discovered in your research?

Speaker 2: 30:50

um, I think we still in this mindset of kind of a historical industrial mindset, of you have to go into the office because that's the only way to actually be productive, um, and there are there are a number of people who still wanting that element of hybrid working post covid and lockdowns, that we know that we can do hybrid. There are people who can't do hybrid or remote working a because they've got a home environment that doesn't allow them to do that. They don't have space in their home to to be able to concentrate, or they they don't have that ability to focus and that's okay to do that. Um, I think, kind of going forward, a lot of this is about and just it's kind of a trial and error thing. I think mostly, and because we are in still an experimental stage of what, what works for each company and it's and it will depend on how big the company is and how and what kind of output you need to achieve. So those who need to be in the office are those who who work together, often as a team, and bounce ideas off each other, because it's when you're working with a team on a remote setting it's very difficult to simulate in-person discussions, so there are teams that have that ability to work flexibly, work remotely, work in a hybrid way, and that's okay. That's okay to do that. But the biggest thing is about making sure that the working style that you use fits what you need to produce and fits those people within the team. So I don't think at this point there's a hard and fast. This is how we've sorted out or this is how it's going to work out going forward.

Speaker 2: 32:34

I think it all depends how big the company is, the types of work you do, the culture in the company and the individuals within the teams. Whether or not the extroverts are introverts, because extroverts struggle with remote working. They need that constant interaction with people to actually have built energy. Introverts love working from home because they actually get focus time and they're not exhausted by this constant communications. Constantly people coming to the desk say hi, and so I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all answer to that. I've come across so many different scenarios. It's very difficult to find a commonality of. This is how things should or could go moving forward.

Speaker 1: 33:16

And another related topic is you know what? You know emails, screens, messages, constant. What impact is this having on things like productivity, focus and even our mental health, which is it kind of comes off the back of if we're, if we're, completely bombarded and stressed? We may not. So what impact and what advice would you suggest if people are?

Speaker 1: 33:39

I mean, I think, like a lot of the theme you've been talking about, is it's quite individual? Yeah, it's, it's. There is, as we say, no one size fits all individual yeah, it's, it's, there is, as we say, no one size fits all. What are the signs that people should pay attention to? Because you, you've been through this thing called a burnout, which, by the way, uh, I I had lunch two days ago with somebody who had the same thing, a young woman. It's not, it used to be kind of not talked about. Now it's really. It really has to be talked about. Yes, and so you know it's, it's something that's real and it happens to lots of people. But what impact and how would people identify some signs for themselves at the individual level that things may not be working in their favor with their use of technology and screens and things?

Speaker 2: 34:22

okay. So, um, to start at the end of your question, I'll go back to how to help yourself with all that. Most people don't know they're about to burn out until they burn out, because it's like the boiling frog syndrome is that we just keep on adding more things until we're a pile of work, there's things that get delayed and we just keep on adding. There's extra job pressures, there's all extra job demands and we just keep on taking on and taking on. We don't kind of give ourselves a break and we kind of burn out slowly and then we just fall apart, we go over the line and we and we go into our um, then I think going.

Speaker 2: 35:02

So, going back to the beginning part of your question, one of the things that we've we we know from in cyber psychology is that we look at notifications within 30 seconds of receiving them, no matter the source. So we often hear people saying we need to turn off notifications. But we really do. We need to turn off notifications with um those companies who have messaging apps that are part of the job. That's very difficult because you constantly have this bing of an email and bing of another message come up in your messaging app, but I think we need to allow employees to take chunks of time out of their day where they can do deep, focus work, where they're not expected to be on email.

Speaker 2: 35:46

Carl Newport, in his most recent book slow productivity, talks about that, and he talks about that in deep work as well. As, just as giving your employees permission to switch off from notifications, giving them permission to not have to product the signal productivity all the time. And we know from like multitasking. The research shows that if you think you're really good at multitasking, you're the worst at it and we don't have ability as humans, biologically, cognitively, in any way, shape or form the ability to focus on the one thing at a time. So multitasking is a fallacy, but it's spoken about in a job context in the knowledge worker world of oh, you must be a good multitasker, it's impossible to be a good multitasker. It's impossible to be a good multitasker. All you're doing is having divided attention multi-sequencing, some people call it exactly.

Speaker 2: 36:35

But even then, if you're working on a big project and suddenly you get an email pop up and you read the email, there's a lag in your attention and your memory fades over time and the longer you distracted, the more that memory trace fades and it takes you five to 15 minutes to get back to the point where you were before in terms of remembering what you were doing and what you're looking at. So we do sometimes at the beginning of the day I think, oh, we've got to get this done today, and by the end of the day we still haven't done it, because we've seen email, we seen a notification, we got distracted by social media posts and we went down a rabbit's hole of checking someone's feed and.

Speaker 1: 37:14

But that's a really important point. If you do simple maths on that, you get interrupted once an hour and you get the 10 minute reset and you multiply that by six hours of work, that's one hour of lost productivity if you're trying to get focused work done right. I mean this is such an important message I'm glad. I mean I'm glad you mean you've researched it, so you're is. You know we have to be careful about interruptions, and it's not other people, that's the. It's often stuff in our devices that we could actually control better. Is that right?

Speaker 2: 37:45

it is. It's exactly that. It's turning off notifications, but also registering the fact that we distract ourselves when we're about to start a big task. That's cognitively demanding. So I'm guilty of this, absolutely admitted. If I'm about to start writing a blog post, I'll quickly go check my social media posts because, a I don't want to start it and, b it's an easy, quick fix and a bit of a dopamine rush and I'm delaying the start of the project and then I can easily get distracted to the point of an hour later I still haven't started.

Speaker 2: 38:17

So it's distracting ourselves, choosing to distract ourselves, as well as being distracted by not turning off notifications, of notifications, but allowing ourselves permission to actually focus, because we feel as though we can't do that because we have this cultural norm and both societal and company cultural norm of quick responding to emails. And that comes, if you think about the last time you said to someone in email I'm sorry, it took me a little while to respond to this, or sorry for the late reply. Go back and look at what time they sent you the email, because often within two or three hours ago oh, sorry for the delay in responding. It's like hold on a second. It's only been three hours If you haven't responded after three days. Yes, sorry, it's taken me so long to reply, but we've gotten to this habit of that 15, 20 years ago when email came out. Yes, we do that, but the time between receiving and responding to an email has shortened because we keep on saying I'm sorry, it's taking me so long to reply.

Speaker 2: 39:21

And the solution to that is stop apologizing for how long it takes you to respond, because when, if I had to, after two hours of receiving emails, I'm sorry for the delay, the other person receiving subconsciously thinks wow, I need to respond within two hours, otherwise that's seen as being an extended period of time and too long. And if that happens in a team environment or corporate environment, that becomes the normative expectations subconsciously within the team. So it's about changing the narrative, it's about changing how long it takes and it's also about training people. So I generally tend not to respond to WhatsApp messages straight away. I delay it. I sometimes take two or three days to respond, but my friends and family know that I won't so because a lot of times if you don't respond immediately, you get this message. Are you okay? What's wrong?

Speaker 2: 40:15

yes I'm driving. I'm not responding, I'm driving.

Speaker 1: 40:18

So and I hope I hope you're using the voice technology to respond, saying I'm driving. I use siri in the car I go. You know, I sometimes check and it'll read the messages I don't know whether people know this and then you can say yes, I'd like to send a quick response and say, yeah, I'm driving, I'll get back to you. Yeah, and, by the way, it's siri that's talking, not me, yeah, no, I just.

Speaker 2: 40:40

I just I just not ignore it, but I delay it, I just don't respond.

Speaker 2: 40:43

Um, and my friends and family are used to that now they don't expect an immediate response, but we train people in our technology behavior response, and so it's kind of untraining people or training them in a different way and training yourself and saying, actually I'm not going to respond to this immediately, I'm going to take my time to respond to this.

Speaker 2: 41:03

Um, so, in terms of hints and tips, I think it's about turn off all notifications, be conscious of your behavior and why you actually are responding to something and why you're checking your emails. What is driving that? So what emotions are driving that? Is it something you need to think about in terms of oh, I'm distracting myself because I don't want to actually start this task, and then questioning if that's a good thing or a bad thing, because it could be for you a good thing but for someone else a bad thing. Um, and then also to um kind of have some communication within your team about response rates and how quickly you expect a response what is a reasonable amount of time, and to stop apologizing for not responding immediately.

Speaker 1: 41:50

So, coming to the end and to synthesize a little bit what you've talked about, but particularly in the theme of the podcast, which is leading people. So you've just given great advice to individuals, right. What would you advise leaders to do to at least accommodate the individual preferences? How can leaders create the context or environment situations where people, for example, can feel that they can have an individual approach to technology?

Speaker 2: 42:22

I think, from a leader perspective, it's about understanding. It's kind of going back to understand the psychology of why people engage in technology, because I think we have very specific perceptions of technology use and we approach it from our own individual perspective. So I think it's about opening up discussions, about educating ourself and why we use our technology, and it's about then having open discussions with our team, because often we don't discuss our technology use. We just discuss what we've got to do and how to get it done. Rather than so, how is technology use impacting us? How is communication by using technology impacting us as individuals and as a team?

Speaker 2: 43:00

So it's really it's kind of, if I had to think about it from a you know that we often are talking about, menopause is a very easy thing that we'd speak about, whereas we didn't talk about it five years ago because it was a hush-hush, no one spoke about it, no one thought about speaking about it.

Speaker 2: 43:14

But now it's a very general discussion in a workplace and within general social environments. We need to open up that conversation about our technology use and for it not to be shameful and we feel ashamed of checking emails at 11 o'clock at night because the media tells us it's a bad thing, but it's not a bad thing. So it's looking at our technologies, understanding that it's okay to do that, knowing where our boundaries are, personally as well as in a team, and opening up those discussions and having frank discussions about what is or isn't acceptable within the team and then monitoring that on a regular basis and allowing people to use the technology if it, if it suits their purposes, but also giving people space to do deep dives into work and not expecting immediate responses all the time so I'm I'm pretty sure that, um, if somebody out there is saying, let's all make sense, who can help me with this, that they might find a willing pair of hands or technology in in your hands.

Speaker 1: 44:18

I guess if somebody wanted to get so we'll get to like if somebody wants to contact you now and find out about a little bit more and maybe what you can do to help, because sometimes, if you're part of the system that's creating this, you're not always in the best position to change the system from within. So sometimes you need a facilitation process which everybody's open to embrace and work through to find out where they can land. So I suppose the question now is how do people get in touch with you? And I believe there might be a special offer for some lucky people out there and I guess I'm going to ask you like I guess you're on linkedin I am most definitely on linkedin, so just search for me, carolyn freeman.

Speaker 2: 45:02

Um. I've got a company page, cybercology, which I also post my podcasts on, um and all that, all the blog posts that I write on my website. But the best way to get in touch with me with me is via linkedin okay and I'll put some links in the show notes and what is the offer?

Speaker 2: 45:18

so I do one hour talks to businesses, so it's either the business as a whole or a teams's, and I'm giving away three talks three hour long talks to the first three people who get in touch with me and ask for it, and then for the first person who gets in touch with me. I'll also provide a team-based workshop that facilitates the discussion amongst the team of how to better manage their technology use and the communication, and part of that is half an hour one-to-one sessions with each person in the team to chat about their technology use and the communication, and part of that is half an hour one-to-one sessions with each person in the team to chat about their technology use and find ways to optimize their productivity while reducing the interruptions that they have on a regular basis.

Speaker 1: 46:00

And for people who don't live down the road from you. Do you also offer this online as well as in person?

Speaker 2: 46:06

This is all online, so it's online talks and online workshops, and I do talks and conferences, but that's a completely different thing those I do in person, but company-based and team-based stuff I do online, okay.

Speaker 1: 46:19

So that's a great offer. For anybody out there who now wants to avail of that offer, get in touch with Carolyn, go to LinkedIn or check out her website. And so, carolyn Freeman, on behalf of our listeners and myself, I'd like to thank you for sharing your insights, wisdom and advice with us today.

Speaker 2: 46:38

It's been such a delight. Thank you for having me on, Jerry.

Speaker 1: 46:45

Coming up in the next episode of Leading People.

Speaker 3: 46:48

Such a good question. So the first thing I would say is values alignment. Does the organization hold the same beliefs and values that you do? And by that I mean, are they honoring what you need to do well in that work environment? A really savvy mentor shared with me decades ago the most important question that we all need to ask every day is this the place where I can do my best work? And if you can answer that question, if you're in an organization where you are empowered to do your best work, then you're in a good place. But if you wake up every day with that pit in your stomach thinking, oh, I don't want to go to work, or you have the Sunday night blues and you're dreading Monday morning, that's a sign and we're going to go back to that red light analogy. It's time to be more aware and really think about is this the right place where I can thrive?

Speaker 1: 47:45

Next time, on Leading People, I'll be speaking with Caroline Dowd-Higgins, a career development expert and author. During our conversation, caroline shares many invaluable insights for greater career satisfaction. You won't want to miss this engaging and practical discussion Until next time.