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Seven impacts of email overload on psychological health in the workplace
Recent years have seen a growing international movement promoting the concept of providing employees with a psychologically healthy workplace
Psychologically healthy workplace ( PHW ) refers to the enhancement of workplace factors that foster employee mental health and wellbeing and therefore enhanced organisational performance and productivity outcomes .
Under Australian occupational health and safety doors , employers are responsible for providing a safe workplace for their staff . Increasingly , this is seen as more than just the traditional emphasis on physical safety , but also on psychological safety as well . One of the main threats to psychological safety is the volume of email that employees ( especially EAs ) are expected to handle on a daily basis and , increasingly , the workload that results from these new messages .
Keeping up with all the new inputs they receive from a wide range of technological devices takes up a lot of an EA ’ s time each day . This occurs not only at work but also during our personal time and more so than ever with the rise of working from home , which has made it harder and harder for EAs to draw the line between working hours and personal time
It ’ s affecting our mental health in the 7 ways explained below .
Stress
1 Stress is a key issue in the workplace , bearing several negative outcomes , with Information Overload being a significant contributor . An unexpected research finding comes from a survey of UK employees , which shows that temporary employees report better well-being , general health , more positive attitude towards work and better work behaviour ( eg : less absenteeism ) than their full-time counterparts . Researchers linked this to the finding that many full-time workers reported high levels of work overload , relatively high levels of irritation , anxiety and depression and a strong interference of work life at home . Another study shows that 35 % of knowledge workers experienced back pain , carpal tunnel syndrome , eye strain , headaches and stress .
A large-scale survey of academic and administrative staff at an Australian university
62 Executive PA | Summer Issue 2021