Page 17 - i-Enjoy

The risk is that we lose sight of what really matters. The huge amount of information that the machines and the cloud make available might lead us to miss our professional and personal objectives, diverting our attention to secondary, not necessarily useful information. This wastes our organisational resources and valuable time, depriving moments of life to ourselves and others, reducing our levels of wellness and happiness.
The working practices that technology has introduced to our workplaces are self-evident, but we are also seeing new values emerge. Efficiency and rigid processes are giving way to more complex processes that focus on impact and effectiveness. What are the characteristics of this change and how do they influence the emotional responses of employees?
D.A. _ Aristotle's Eudaimonia defines happiness as individual contentment and positive integration in a social context, a process of mutual socialisation and integration that fosters wellness. This combination of wellness and a sense of effectiveness depends on the chance to balance opportunities to act and meet external challenges with the personal abilities and experience. Each individual can apply to cope with the demands placed on them.
Technology offers one part of the essential support people need to carry out their working activities, whether that is passive support in terms of their comfort in an environment or active support in the form of work tools, notably informatics.
It is a structural and cyclical factor that is linked to daily life, but is also able to nurture a significant level of engagement, a state in which cognitive processes – both motivational and emotional – interact and function in an integrated way compared to people’s capacities and expectancies.
Experience demands that people have clear and non-contradictory objectives, and that the external context and current situation provide clear and fast feedback on the consequences of specific behaviours. In that way, people become aware of how things are going, and the consequences of their actions. This, undoubtedly, is hugely facilitated by technology.
It is increasingly difficult to distinguish the digital from the physical world. This changes the way we perceive the world and changes the
desires of people in a work context and so needs to be addressed. So how do we anticipate these needs. And how do we draw a line between identifying anticipated needs and creating them?
D.A. _ Plantronics uses different tools to identify employees’ needs, seeking wellness at work. The first is annual participation in the Great Place to Work survey, which measures their levels of “comfort” and satisfaction, returning useful indicators of happiness, and identifying areas of interest and possible improvement.
The second is the Leesman Index, used when there is a change to the working environment, such as reorganisation and relocation, to identify weaknesses and needs – which may be technological – and consequently to develop designs which improve wellness and productivity based on tangible needs.
Apart from surveys and research, the most important prerequisite for the development of human happiness is always relationships. Transparent communication, the absence of hierarchies, attention to social relationships aren’t just the means by which we identify needs, but fundamentally address the most important ways of achieving happiness.
In the future, how much will our happiness depend on access to and the use of technology?
D.A. _ Technology has invaded our lives and is now essential in making them easier and more agile, freeing us to meet our needs as human beings. Technology in itself is neither useful nor harmful, but the way we use it has to be constructive if it is to improve our wellness and happiness rather than raise our levels of stress and frustration. Many big companies have now started to restrict the time people spend on email after they learned just how out of balance people’s work-life balance really was.
This is the perfect example of the law of unintended consequences when it comes to technology, having the opposite effect of that intended. It is literally all about the way we apply it in our lives. Technology is now just a normal part of our daily professional and personal lives and I think its impact is positive when used constructively.
The only difference will be made by our consciousness.
THE EXPERT TALKS | 17