Technostress is killing productivity. Culture is the cure.
Technology changes fast.
With each new change, employees are forced to adapt. That process of adapting is painful — physically and psychologically.
That’s why we seem to get a new health problem related to technology every few years.
I want to tell you about the Mother of All technology-related health problems: technostress. But first, a history lesson.
When computers broke our bodies
Business PCs went mainstream in the 1990s. At the beginning of the decade, most people didn’t use PCs in offices. By 2000, pretty much all office work involved PCs.
The use of mice and keyboards and the necessity of sitting and using a PC all day caused a pandemic of repetitive stress injuries, including carpal tunnel syndrome. It seems as if everybody got injured by their PCs at some point.