How to Balance Technology and Well-Being in the Digital Age

STEVE HENDERSHOT
In the business world, technology is utterly astonishing and extraordinarily valuable—and at the same time, potentially harmful. Take video calls. They facilitate real-time, face-to-face work on global teams but also seem to contribute to a growing tech burnout trend. Today we’re looking at how project leaders and teams can make sure they’re using workplace tech tools in ways that are not only efficient and effective but also healthy and sustainable.

In today’s fast-paced and complex business landscape, project professionals lead the way, delivering value while tackling critical challenges and embracing innovative ways of working. On Projectified®, we bring you insights from the project management community to help you thrive in this evolving world of work through real-world stories and strategies, inspiring you to advance your career and make a positive impact.

This is Projectified. I’m Steve Hendershot.

Tech is awesome. Tools like collaboration software and document-sharing platforms are essential to making modern work possible for today’s distributed and asynchronous teams.

But there can be a downside: digital overload. When you’re always on, always plugged in, your well-being is at risk. More than two-thirds of remote workers report increased burnout tied to their use of digital communications tools, according to a Forbes Advisor survey. 

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, which makes this a great time to dig into how project professionals and their teams are using tech in their day to day—and what they can do to make that relationship a healthier one. 

We had two conversations that do exactly that. First up is Serban Morea, a program manager at Renesas Electronics in Phoenix, Arizona, in the United States. Serban works from home. So there is a seemingly relentless demand for him to use tech to stay connected with teams. He told me how he sets and maintains digital boundaries.

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STEVE HENDERSHOT
Serban, nowadays there’s a lot of technology baked into how people interact with each other at work. How has that changed team dynamics and individual project professionals’ experience at work? 

SERBAN MOREA 
Now we’re so interconnected over many, many miles, right? We have people working all over the world. It helps us connect easier, and we can find a lot more talent that companies are able to tap into that they weren’t able to when we didn’t have all this technology that was connecting us. But then the disadvantage is the fact that you get pinged at any time, and you’re not really seeing the face of the other person. 

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
So what does that do to well-being, either from a whole team perspective or an individual one?

SERBAN MOREA 
The one thing that I do know that technology has done for all of us, combined with this remote work, is the fact that now we are on 24/7. There’s people working on the other side of the world where you go to bed, and they start working and they can ask a question, and if we’re not mindful of the technology and we are not putting certain guardrails into our chats and our emails, then we end up just working 24/7. And again, with the fact that technology helps us work remote, now we don’t know where the barrier is between not working or being at home, right? Because you’re basically shutting down your laptop and you’re at home with your family, but then an email comes in on your phone and then you open up your laptop again. I think that’s the biggest challenge that we face now, is to be able to be mindful of when do we turn off the technology? When do we switch from all the digital that surrounds us and go analog?

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
When have you noticed yourself tipping to an unhealthy pattern of behavior or just bad state of mind, and what’d you do about it? And then also what guardrails have you put in going forward?

SERBAN MOREA 
I want to say that I’m very self-aware and I notice when stress gets to me. Even though I want to say that I am very capable of using strategies to cope with stress, I fall into getting stressed out and fall into getting overwhelmed by all the responsibilities that I have. I also use my wife as a canary in the mine, when I tend to be too short or I am too serious. I don’t like to take myself too serious, but then when I get stressed and overwhelmed, I do bring out the serious side of me, and I either pay attention and notice it or my wife would let me know for sure.

I am very mindful of making sure that I have my guardrails set. I always am attentive to have notifications turned off, emails and instant messaging always turned off until I am ready to go into work. I make a point to ensure that I take care of my health early in the morning, eating and working out before I open up my laptop. So I make a point to step into my work and into my office at 8 o’clock and work until 5 o’clock. Of course, there’s moments where meetings go on a little bit longer, but even that I put a certain guardrail and boundary that I don’t have that many meetings after 5 o’clock. So I try to set certain rules for myself so that I don’t work 24/7 and I don’t end up just burning out because emails keep coming in.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
Just curious, what does the early morning workout look like?

SERBAN MOREA 
There’s a mountain here in Phoenix that I try to go hike. That always is a very good disconnect from all the technology and just puts things in perspective. It’s just how small we are in this world. So hiking is always a good refresher for my well-being. But then I also go to the gym. I like to release some energy by either pressing or pushing some weight.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
I like the idea of just changing the eye level, changing your circumstances, too. It’s convenient for me to go in the other room and be able to burn a bunch of calories, but it’s like the change in context, I think, might be a helpful reset.

SERBAN MOREA 
Yeah, and I think you said something very valuable here—the idea of taking a break. We’re jumping from meeting to meeting all the time, and we don’t even give ourselves a break, and our brain needs a switch, needs a little bit of a break. So the fact that you said that you’re closing your laptop and then you’re going into the other room, that kind of makes your brain think of that. There’s a separation between what happened and what’s happening next. And this is something that I encourage everybody to do, is to finish up a meeting and go into the kitchen or go to the cooler and grab some water to just disconnect for a second and just have a reset on your brain before you jump into the next thing that you have to do.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
How do you think about observing these patterns on your team, trying to figure out when and how and where it’s appropriate to suggest some course corrections, and what does that look like?

SERBAN MOREA 
I’m always mindful that there’s always plenty of work to do. When I see my colleagues working late into the night, I always try to encourage them to stop and limit themselves and how much they work after-hours, because yes, it works at a certain level when the pressure is high and we need to deliver something, but if we continue doing that, then we’ll end up burning out. Whenever someone’s constantly responding to emails at 9 o’clock, there’s a little chat that we have to have to ensure that they’re mindful that it’s good for the company but it’s not good for them in the long run. In the long run, it’s not going to be good for the company, too. So just being mindful of making sure that they turn off and disconnect from their work and the technology is highly necessary.
 
STEVE HENDERSHOT 
It’s interesting. People cannot constantly work 12-hour days. And yet, in our tech-driven ways of working, it’s easier to work a few more hours than normal when there’s an urgent deliverable deadline. How do you build in that elasticity where teams have boundaries, with the understanding that some days the extra effort is a must-have for project success? 

SERBAN MOREA 
I’m always reminded of a story that I’ve heard with a program manager that was working on this multiyear project, and it was coming to an end. The project was high stress, high pressure, a lot of activities that were happening. The program manager was used to working those extra hours, but as the project was tapering down, she went to her manager and asked the manager, like, “Hey, my workload has been diminished. What else do you want me to do?” And in that moment, the manager told her, “Never ask me that again.” 

I wish I knew that manager. But then what he said is that “Work is like the ocean. We have high tides when we do need to perform and work the extra hours and be engaged and be okay with that high pressure. But there’s times when the low tide comes in. And when that low tide comes in and we feel like we are not earning our worth and we are not productive and we are slacking, those are the times where we need to take the time and rest and recover.” That’s kind of how I look into working with my team. There’s deadlines that need to be met. And yes, there are a few days prior to the deadline that work gets crowded and it’s a lot of pressure, and it’s okay then to work the extra hours, but we need to make sure that after that extra hour, we also calm down. We rest and recover.

MUSICAL TRANSITION

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
Project professionals need an eye for refining processes and practices so that they’re creating sustainable long-term value—which reframes the challenges associated with tech burnout as an opportunity for innovation. When we spoke with Santhosh Nair, he was a senior program manager at civil engineering firm Downer Group in Sydney—he recently took a new position at Precise Financial Services. Santhosh talked with Projectified’s Hannah LaBelle about how ensuring teams use new tech tools the right way can increase productivity and maintain wellness.

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HANNAH LABELLE
Santhosh, let’s start our discussion with tech’s impact on project management. How have you seen technology change the workplace for project managers? 

SANTHOSH NAIR
Project managers are one of the communities who has the mindset and acquired capability to adapt and manage change because [a] project itself is a change, and the recent improvement, I would say, in technology, it’s enormous, which has changed a lot in the way project managers manage those projects or manage those changes. So it has definitely impacted them positively and negatively. It definitely [has] made their life much quicker. They have to do less manual work, et cetera. But there are challenges. There are definitely challenges which tech has brought in their life, too.

HANNAH LABELLE
What technology are you using on a day-to-day basis as a project professional? And how has that tech helped you? How has it benefited your project work and your project processes?

SANTHOSH NAIR 
Right now at Downer, I’m using a project and portfolio management [PPM] tool at enterprise level. Then there is a reporting tool. On top of that, you have the collaboration tool for exchanging views and sharing documents, et cetera. The project management portfolio manager provides me all the data at one place, [the] reporting [tool] allows me to use it to provide various versions of the data to various stakeholders. And [the] collaboration [tool] helps me to have remote calls, et cetera, with people who are based in various time zones. So these are primary. Then there are the other tools like email, your messaging app.

So my team, Hannah, they are based in multiple time zones. So I’ve got people based in India, New Zealand, in Manila and sometimes in Europe. So the collaboration tool allows me to be in touch with them. In the case the team needs to reach out to me for something urgent, they can. The project and portfolio management tool, which is an enterprise level, it has got all the data, people are populating info. This provides a consolidated view of everything for me to manage, control, make decisions quickly. That would have been a very manual task if that was not available to me at my disposal at any moment of time. 

HANNAH LABELLE 
All this technology can have positive or negative impacts on people’s well-being. First, how has workplace tech positively affected your well-being?

SANTHOSH NAIR 
I work three to four days a week from home, and I can only do that just because of tech. So I have to thank tech for the fact that I can work from home, which allows me to even look at some of the personal stuff while I’m at home. Then there are the automation of PPM tools, which I mentioned earlier. The availability of all the data, information, allows me to plan anything and quickly take action during crunch time. It is a big peace of mind. Always like, “Oh, okay, if anything goes wrong or in a such situation, I do not need to scramble. I have got everything in the tool, which I can pull out and take action.” Work[ing] from home gives me a good work-life balance, and then peace of mind for all the data and tools available at my disposal at any moment of time. 

HANNAH LABELLE 
So those are some positives, now let’s talk about the flipside. What about any negative effects?

SANTHOSH NAIR
There is some stress or challenges these tools have brought up. Technology over the recent years have changed human expectation and behavior. That’s what I’ve seen. Or if I compare to 10 years back, a person would not bother you on what’s happening, what’s going wrong and won’t be asking tons of questions. They won’t have any perception. It will be mostly you going and updating them on what’s happening. But now I see that stakeholders, they have lost patience, they don’t have a lot of patience. They want data quickly. They come with certain perceptions. It has become very challenging to get across our message or present the information they are seeking or preparing a report. So that has become a very enormous task now.

The tools again. Every time new tools come into it, you have a learning curve. So when a project manager, program manager starts working, on top of their work, they also have to carry a learning curve to learn quickly how the tools operate. That adds a lot of stress. Then at the same time, a tool which is not implemented properly presents challenges for the entire organization and the staff.

Let’s take the example of a PPM tool, a project and portfolio management tool. It’s an enterprise application, multiple brands available. If an organization has not implemented this properly, it provides a stress for the entire PMO. You can’t pull the data correctly or you can’t load the data correctly. I’ve also seen that sometimes you’re using the tool and at the same time doing it manually. So you’re running parallel. I have seen project managers leaving work just because the tool used by an organization is not implemented properly and it’s a bit of a chaos. 

HANNAH LABELLE 
How are you monitoring tech stress and well-being on your team? And how do you make sure no one is headed toward burnout? And what do you do if you think they might be coming close to that point?

SANTHOSH NAIR 
I have regular one-on-ones with them. During this one-on-one, I listen. I observe, and if someone is remote, I make sure it’s videoconferencing, not just audio. I observe. I listen to find out if something is going wrong. Most of the time people either tell you or they show the signs of some existing issues either through their tone or through their body language or the way they look at you, et cetera. So I probe into it and find out, I follow up. As I follow this process, I have a good trust with the team. There are some things they tell me, some I pick up, and I probe, and together, we work to resolve it either as a team or between two people. 

My organization has got a program where people can have confidential chats with therapists or psychologists, et cetera. I have encouraged my team to use that, and they have come and told me they have used that and that was really helpful. So that is a technology contribution that you have: a toll-free number available for you to call or book an appointment, and there’s a psychologist available somewhere, in some corner of the world, who’s ready to help you at any point in time. 

HANNAH LABELLE 
How do you try to minimize the negative effects tech can have in your work environment and on your well-being?

SANTHOSH NAIR
It’s a combination of awareness followed by reflection. I’ve been aware of the challenges tech provides in my work. For example, [a] notification which pops up distracts me. To improve that or make sure I manage it well, I use reflection. So I spend 20 to 40 minutes once a week—I set it on a Friday, which is my light day—I go through everything. I sit alone. I look at how the past week went. Was there anything which I did which I could improve? 

Did I get distracted by an email? And did I stop working and run behind it? Did I carry my phone to the meeting? Did I keep my phone properly or away while I was doing an active listening in one of the sessions? I mark myself, grade myself and I try to give myself actions for the following week so I don’t do it. I’ve been doing it since 2015. I’ve been practicing that and a little bit of meditation, too. That has really helped me to manage being aware of what are the possibilities and then through reflection, correcting it or adjusting it as I go.

HANNAH LABELLE 
Santhosh, thank you so much. This has been a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate your time.

SANTHOSH NAIR 
Thank you very much, Hannah. 

STEVE HENDERSHOT
And thank you for listening to Projectified®. If you like what you heard, you can listen to more episodes on your preferred podcast platform or visit PMI.org/podcast. And please subscribe to the show and leave a rating or review—it’s always great to hear from you. Hope you can join us next episode!