Can IT Help Prevent the Burnout It So Often Contributes To?

I want you to do something for a moment. Think about each of your employees and how it would impact your operations if they suddenly quit… without actually quitting.

The quiet quitting phenomenon has become fairly notorious, as has one of its largest contributors: notification fatigue. Let’s talk about what notification fatigue is, the impacts it can have on your team members, and—most importantly—what can be done about it. 

What is Notification Fatigue?

How often do you look at your inbox and sigh, seeing double-digit messages coming in, the majority of them being notifications, half of them updates you’ve seen a dozen times before, and the other half of no relevance to you any longer?

In an attention-based economy, it can be tempting to simply keep shouting a message from the rooftops, hoping your audience will pick it up. The difference is that your employees are, for the most part, a captive audience. They have little choice but to view these messages.

The Impacts are Significant

As such, these notifications become so expected that your team members tune them out automatically. It’s basic economics: a surplus brings the inherent value of each down. As a result, your team is less and less engaged with the notifications they receive.

It also doesn’t help if these notifications start invading your team’s personal time, encroaching on their time to relax, refresh, and recharge. You and your business then face the physiological impacts and productivity deficits that result from these trends, such as…

• The conflict between the dopamine a new message triggers and the cortisol that a notification dumps into your system, emphasizing burnout and discouraging focused effort.
• The tendency of context switching that the modern workplace encourages breaks up our attention and prevents consistent productivity.
• The energy demanded by constant collaboration being drained from employees prematurely, especially through video chatting.

Naturally, none of this is good for your team or your business.

How to Avoid and Relieve Notification Fatigue

Fortunately, there are steps you and your team can take to eliminate unnecessary notifications or at least reduce their frequency—many of which are facilitated by the very technology that would otherwise cause this notification-related burnout. For instance:

You Can Unify Your Communications

By consolidating your tools into more inclusive platforms (particularly your communications and collaboration solutions), you can eliminate significant context switching by keeping your users within a single tool.

You Can Manage Which and When Notifications are Sent

The key is to ensure that relevant information is being delivered at the appropriate times. For the workplace, that generally means that work-related notifications are received during work hours. You and your users can use the settings in various applications to customize when (or even if) certain notifications are delivered to the recipient. Plus, you can (and should) encourage your employees to use these tools to silence notifications when focusing on specific tasks, or at least to establish set times during the day to review the communications they have received.

You Can Normalize Disconnection

Crucially, you need to emphasize a healthy work-life balance and reinforce it by creating technical and policy-based boundaries that protect it. If one of your team members has a habit of pinging people long after hours to ask questions that could easily wait until the morning, make sure the above methods are being used, and communicate with them to clarify your expectations for work-related communications.

What If Something Truly Urgent Arises?

Of course, there are always exceptions you need to consider. Some circumstances—particularly disaster events and other emergencies—will necessitate communication that would otherwise be excessive. For these cases, you need clear protocols ready and to have communicated which events make such exceptions necessary.

At the End of the Day, You Don’t Want to Push Your Team to Flame Out and Quit

We can help you put the tools in place to balance a productive and successful workplace with a happy and healthy workforce. Learn more by calling us at (276) 601-3208 today.