Why workplace wellness must account for Digital Wellbeing

My childhood dream job was to be a professional travel guide.

The next Rick Steves or Anthony Bourdain. Something that would allow me to spend hours each day walking, exploring, and connecting with new people and places in meaningful and life-changing ways. Perhaps you yourself had childhood aspirations as well. An astronaut, singer, or soccer player. Whatever it was, I'm sure that neither your dream (nor mine) was to work and live via a screen all day and night, feeling stressed, overwhelmed, and fatigued.

As we aged, we grew accustomed to what is now our reality: negative feelings, thoughts, and sore bodies as part of our professional lives, far from what we dreamed of as kids. The negative effects of constant stress on our physical and mental health lead to physical issues like stomach pain, headaches, and backaches. Cognitively, we often have trouble staying on task or enjoying "deep work" due to the continuous cacophony of pings and alerts that fragment our attention and distract.

Not only does this lack of digital wellness impact us on a human level, but it impacts the bottom lines of our employers as well: costing an estimated avg. of $7,500 per employee annually in presenteeism, retention, and behavioral health spend.

Did you Know?

• 51% of chief human resource officers identify employee anxiety and burnout as a top challenge for their businesses
• 35% of employees cite an "inability to unplug" as the biggest challenge they face in remote work.
• 83% of employees are looking to their employer to help them find better balance navigating work and life in the digital age

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While many employers realize how hard it is for employees to shut off when it comes to their digital lives both at work and home, they currently lack the tools & resources for change.

That's' why the Digital Wellness Institute created a solution.

Using the Digital Flourishing Model, we illustrate digital wellness as the "optimal state of health and wellbeing that a person using technology is capable of achieving." From this model we created interactive and engaging e-learnings + corporate culture talks to educate employees and their organizations on the interconnectedness of its dimensions: productivity, environment, communication, relationships, mental health, physical health, the quantified self, and digital citizenship.

For example, an employee's mental health may suffer when they haven't stepped away from screens to get physical exercise. They know company-provided meditation apps like Headspace and Calm can help, but simply feel they can't step away from screens due to the never-ending bombardment of emails and personal messages.

As with a puzzle, achieving true digital wellbeing means that employees and their employers see how all the pieces fit together.

Not only do our courses and talks educate on the importance of digital wellness within the workplace, but we've also created the first tool to measure and assess the level of digital wellness within a workplace to provide industry-level benchmarking and track the effectiveness of our trainings.

Now is the time to rethink how we work.

It's time we acknowledge the role that digital wellness plays in the employee wellbeing experience.

It's time employers take action.