This blog post is based on the webinar A Guide To Digital Wellness: Avoiding Burnout in the Digital Age. The event, hosted by myself, featured the insights of Amy Haworth, Senior Director, Employee Experience at Citrix; Elizebeth Varghese, Global Leader and Global Top 100 HR Influencer at IBM; and Kibibi Springs, Workplace Wellbeing Knowledge Lead at Herman Miller. You can view the webinar on demand now.

“To do well, we have to be well,” says Amy Haworth, Senior Director, Employee Experience at Citrix.

The global pandemic, widespread home working, and a geographically dispersed workforce have accelerated the importance of employee wellness and, more specifically, digital wellness. A recent Citrix survey revealed that 97 percent of respondents agree that digital wellness solutions are necessary for strengthening and preserving company culture.

In this webinar, we pick apart the foundations of a people strategy to demonstrate the innate value of digital wellness and particularly as we look ahead to a hybrid future. Five clear priorities and considerations emerged.

Digital wellness begins with setting and controlling boundaries

Prior to the pandemic, the boundary between work and the office, and our personal life, was arguably more distinct. In the current environment of home working, those boundaries have largely disappeared, and with it has surfaced an expectation to be ‘digitally present’.

The concept of digital wellness encourages leaders and organizations to set boundaries, appropriate to the situation. “It comes down to helping businesses balance how they are setting boundaries, in the formation of work and life, and how the barrier between the two is being managed,” says Elizebeth Varghese, Global Leader in Talent & HR Strategy Transformation at IBM. “People need to feel like they have a choice in controlling those boundaries, too.”

Leaders must give employees “permission” to prioritize their wellness

The concept of organizations and leaders granting their employees “permission” to priotize their health and wellness and to try new things will be critical as we shift toward a hybrid-work scenario. Haworth says that having the permission to change the environment and “take away some of the formality of work and leave some of the technology behind, seems to be a signal that employees can bring more of themselves into a specific situation.”

For leaders especially, storytelling and transparency will be important vehicles for conveying this sense of permission. “By bringing our own narratives and talking through the times we have struggled or when we have tried something new, enables us to exchange information and ideate together, and also allows us to give permission,” Haworth says.

Kibibi Springs, Workplace Wellbeing Knowledge Lead at Herman Miller, says, “There have been little moments that have really mattered, like seeing an out-of-office message saying, ‘I am taking a break to replenish my energy,’ and that gave me permission to follow suit.” She also cites LinkedIn’s move to give employees worldwide a paid week off, earlier in the year, to avoid burnout, as “an outstanding and bold move in the right direction.”

Maintaining social connection in a hybrid world is vital

The office provided ample opportunities for social interaction and engagement, but the shift toward remote working has largely removed this aspect of employee life.

According to Haworth, prior to the pandemic, “We used these spontaneous social connections as a proxy for culture.”  She says that in these interactions, there was trust, and “trust has an energy to it.”

“People are hungry for meaningful connections now,” she says, along with the informality that those connections bring. Business leaders need to be experimental in how they replicate this in a virtual world.

Varghese pointed out that human connection delivers a positive energy “that fuels you on.” However, people go about making human connections in different ways, and there needs to be some intent behind the process. Springs says that at Herman Miller, she is often challenged to continue building new serendipitous human connections.

Individuals must reorganize their technology usage to avoid burnout

“Digital wellness is the double-edged sword of technology: it is the thing that we suffer from but is also the thing that can deliver some major wellness benefits,” Springs says. She believes there is a need for training around how we engage with technology and how much time we spend on it, so that we can begin to alter our relationship with it and associated behavior. “One of the first things I recommend to people is to reorganize the way they use technology, beginning with turning off all of the notifications that are firing up, making us anxious,” Springs says.

Recently, we have seen some organizations experiment with technology designed to support digital wellness. How we integrate this into an employee’s journey will be key, Haworth says, and particularly “if we can meet employees where they are and intersect that day with guidance and tips around wellbeing … so that we can surprise and delight.”

Varghese says her work focuses on talent requirements and that people should sit at the center of technology design, while technology should “wrap around and enable them.”

We need to talk about effectiveness, as well as productivity

In the move away from “presenteeism,” the focus also needs to shift from the pressure of working long hours and productivity, to output and an individual’s overall effectiveness.

Haworth says, “In addition to talking about productivity, we also need to be talking about effectiveness. This is not the industrial age. We are not cogs in a machine, rather we are humans, and it is not so much about activity as about outcomes.” She says one of the big success pillars of hybrid working is a clearer focus on what the expectation is and allowing autonomy to get us there, so that people focus on the right things.

The pandemic has shown us that we can work effectively from home if we choose. Looking ahead there are many possibilities for change, and digital wellness needs to be at the center of these conversations. We have seen how resilient we as human beings are, and as we move into the next phase of hybrid work, my hope is that the human empathy and integrity we have learned will carry us through. How well we do this will be the next great endeavor.

View the full webinar on demand now.