February 26, 2020
Constantly checking your work email? You aren’t alone
PHOTO | Pixabay.com
By Michelle Tuccitto Sullo
Do you keep checking your work email even after you go home for the evening? What about your voicemail when you are on vacation?
When we think of the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) phenomenon, we typically think of young people glued to their social media accounts, then feeling like failures if their lives don’t measure up.
Christopher Budnick, an assistant psychology professor at Southern Connecticut State University, decided to investigate how common FOMO is in the workplace and how it impacts employees’ well-being.
He chose people who regularly use technology for work and set about discovering how FOMO is impacting them.
Budnick surveyed 300 workers who represented a cross-section of race, gender, age and geography. The results were outlined in an article, “The Fear of Missing Out at Work: Examining Costs and Benefits to Employee Health and Motivation” published recently in Computers in Human Behavior. Budnick worked with Arielle Rogers of Northern Illinois University and Larissa Barber of San Diego State University on the project.
The researchers defined workplace FOMO as “pervasive apprehension that, relative to other employees, one might miss valuable career opportunities when away or disconnected from work.” Those opportunities might include building professional relationships, gaining key information and contributing to decisions and projects.
It’s a common phenomenon for employees. Only 13 percent of the workforce reports never experiencing FOMO, according to Budnick. He said workers with high levels of FOMO check their email more frequently, feel the need to respond immediately to messages, and worry about missing important information and networking opportunities.
Work-life balancing act
An employer’s attitude about the importance of work-life balance impacts employees, according to Budnick.
When working for employers who did not consider work-life balance a priority, individuals with high levels of FOMO checked their messages more frequently, the study showed. The opposite was true if employers stressed the importance of work-life balance.
“If their employers were very supportive of work-life separation, they didn’t check messages as much,” Budnick said. “Organizations which were supportive of work/life balance overall do seem to have lower levels of FOMO.”
Perhaps surprisingly, the research showed that individuals with high levels of FOMO reported higher well-being when working for employers who did not value work-life balance as much. They actually reported higher stress when working for an employer who discouraged checking messages in one’s free time. According to Budnick, this may be due to “giving in to the compulsion of checking messages, which temporarily reduces anxiety levels.”
Budnick
“With individuals who are high in FOMO but believe they need to be on all the time, they do check in, but counterintuitively, they report more well-being,” Budnick said.
While these subjects reported that constant checking in helped reduce anxiety in the short term, Budnick cautioned against long-term burnout.
He found that individuals with high levels of FOMO tended to experience a higher incidence of workplace burnout than their peers, particularly when their employers did not value work-life balance highly.
“Overall, for people who are higher in FOMO, they have higher levels of burnout,” Budnick said.
While having employees always being connected may be viewed as a positive by employers, Budnick cautioned that long-term it can be a problem if employees experience burnout and negative health consequences.
The World Health Organization has included burnout as an occupational phenomenon, “resulting from chronic workplace stress,” characterized by exhaustion, negative feelings toward one’s job and impaired performance.
Contact Michelle Tuccitto Sullo at msullo@newhavenbiz.com.
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