Technostress: Can technology help your teams reclaim work‑life balance?

Traditionally, productivity has been measured by outputs – the hours spent, the units produced. But with digital tools automating many outputs, business leaders are becoming more interested in outcomes. For example, has the customer experience improved? Have problems been solved with innovative solutions?

Individual performance used to be tracked in isolation, but collaborative working platforms like Slack, Teams, and Jira make it much easier to track teamwork. As a result, a person's value is based in part on what they contribute to collective goals, how they share knowledge, and how they keep the flow of work moving.

We once praised individuals for their knowledge, and as a result, they guarded it closely. Now, it's vital that all knowledge is as accessible as possible. Through digital documentation, dashboards, and wikis, employees can be valued for how much they enable collective learning rather than for what they know.

While some industries still require individuals to build specific skills over many years, for knowledge workers, it's more about adapting to new software and platforms, learning quickly, and developing digital fluency. Deep expertise is still needed, but individuals who can get up to speed quickly have great value, too.

Productivity metrics don't account for traits that have become extremely important: fostering team cohesion, showing empathy, and creating psychological safety. In a remote and hybrid working world, these characteristics have never been more important. They directly impact team member engagement and performance.

On the one hand, teams may be constantly bombarded with notifications, online meetings, and real-time updates – and the sense that they're reachable at all times. On the other hand, their daily lives can lack human connection. They might feel isolated, unseen, or emotionally detached – a key symptom of quiet cracking, and something leaders can address.

In Adaptavist's latest research report The human cost of digital transformation, 40% of knowledge workers said they've experienced emotional withdrawal, while 37% have had reduced communications with colleagues. And over a quarter (26%) said they often feel overwhelmed by digital noise, which may be contributing to their increased emotional withdrawal from work.

For your team members, this may mean:

The impact can be profound. Real team cohesion could be hard to come by, with colleagues failing to feel like real collaborators. This, alongside loneliness and digital exhaustion, can be a major reason they leave or why your company culture struggles to take hold. With lots of shallow interactions happening all the time, it may be noticeable that focused, creative work doesn't get done.

Some of your team may dread time off because they know they'll be drowning in unread messages when they return. Instead, auto-redirect urgent emails to someone else and use auto-summaries (like Slack's highlights) for a concise snapshot of what's happened. This makes catching up less effort and is completed in hours rather than days, a real productivity win.

Remote workers can feel pressure to always be on, checking messages at all hours. Why not encourage them to make the most of 'do not disturb' settings? Mute notifications outside of work or during breaks, and schedule sending to fire off responses during working hours only.

Endless video calls can leave individuals in your teams feeling drained, with no time for focused work or their personal lives. Asynchronous video tools (like Loom) or collaboration tools (like Miro boards) can reduce the time your teams spend in meetings, whether in person or virtually. They should be mindful of etiquette, though. In our research study, 40% of respondents said it was 'somewhat rude' or 'very rude' when colleagues send AI assistants to attend meetings.

When your teams use the same device for work and personal use, there's a temptation or pressure to keep checking work updates during their downtime. The lines become very blurred. Help sharpen them by encouraging them to set up separation profiles or containers, or removing work-specific apps from their personal devices altogether. These give your teams a clean break between work and personal apps, so when work mode is off, it's really off.

Most of these steps are about helping leaders to establish a healthy work culture, where rest is prioritised as much as work.

Read the full report – The human cost of digital transformation – to understand the broader issues around quiet cracking, including what leads to technostress and technojoy and the transformative impact of organisational culture.