Social media addiction by design poses hard questions for business use

Employee wellbeing in the digital age

Justin Megawarne, managing partner of London-based technology consultancy Megaslice, lets the company’s 15 employees choose where to work – whether that be at home, the office or at a client site. “That extends out to how you control your head space,” he says. “If you want to turn all your notifications off for five hours, do it. Do whatever you have to do to make the client happy – sometimes that means being available for interruptions, sometimes it doesn’t.”

The company discourages staff from using social media – given the toxicity of some discussions and their echo chamber tendency which can lessen diversity of thought – and encourages them to talk to each other, whether face to face or through a call. The company currently uses Google Chat but is considering a move to Twist, an asynchronous messaging app with fewer notifications and no presence indicator.

Megawarne says that he does not see the appeal of gamification and other social media techniques. “If I see a tool and I think an intelligent person would baulk at this, I probably will not adopt it,” he says. “If it has all these shiny things going ‘ping!’ and I can’t see a thoughtful person wanting to use this, then that’s it.”

He is keen on his staff taking breaks from what is often intellectually and creatively demanding work: “You have to let the mind sit fallow. There are things that happen in the unconscious and the subconscious that don’t happen if you are constantly on it, constantly interrupted, constantly switched on.” He sometimes intervenes if he sees staff working late online: “I will tell them, you have to stop right now, close the laptop now, don’t answer your phone, don’t look at your messages.” To set an example, if he has an idea at 9.30pm, he may write an email but schedule it to send at 8am the following morning.

Megawarne says employers should ask themselves if software notifications increase either customer satisfaction or employee morale, and if not, shut them down. Some employers say they do not matter as their staff are not that creative, but he adds: “They are very creative at trying to get work done and gaming all these stupid measures. People are genuinely ingenious when it comes to working around something.”

When you stop measuring inputs like when people are online, and you start measuring what they actually deliver, you give them agency over their relationship with that technology

Danny Coleman, director of strategic services and operations at UK-headquartered technology consultancy Adaptavist, runs a team that helps clients to use work management platform Monday.com. “My thesis is that organisations should measure outputs, not inputs,” he says. “When you stop measuring inputs like when people are online, and you start measuring what they actually deliver, you give them agency over their relationship with that technology. That’s what frees people up to use this technology in ways that benefits them without succumbing to some of those gamification techniques.”

He adds that practice is more important than theory: “Policy plays a role, but trusting people to manage their own time and how they use those tools plays a bigger role.” If organisations say there is no expectation to respond to messages out of business hours, but reward those who do or punish those who don’t, staff will draw their own conclusions.

Coleman says that configuring systems to work for neurodivergent staff can help: “If every AI feature and every engagement mechanic in enterprise software is optimised for engagement, then that’s not going to serve those neurodivergent users. Neurodivergent-friendly design is better for everybody, it just happens to be necessary for people require different ways of engaging with technology. If you design for people who are most sensitive to that digital noise, you end up building a better experience for the whole user base.”

It also means that neurodivergent users may be able to use systems without changes, helping them and meeting legal requirements for necessary adjustments without extra work.

The problem with default software features

Coleman states that suppliers such as social media providers can set up business software to maximise engagement – in their case, to boost sales. “Engagement mechanics work, at least by the vendors’ definition of work,” he adds.

A good starting point is to turn off all the features that are not essential, rather than accepting the default settings, then reinstate features only when there are clear reasons to do so: “The default is a decision, it’s just one someone else made for you,” he says, adding that it is worthwhile to ask whether a feature solves a problem for you rather than the software provider, whether it gives staff more autonomy or takes up their time, and whether they can opt-out without penalty. “If you can’t answer those clearly, you should probably leave it off,” he says.

Coleman adds that it is then worth testing settings with a pilot group including a cross-section of the workforce. “The worst-case scenario looks like enabling a feature for 5,000 people because it looked good in a vendor presentation. You need to see it in action and get real feedback,” he says.

He warns against attention-grabbing features such as red badges, push notifications and pop-up banners, particularly if they use the same visual weight regardless of importance. “When everything looks urgent, nothing is actually urgent and the employee’s brain has to do the sorting work that the software should have done,” he says. “That’s exhausting. It trains people into a reactive mode, where they are constantly triaging rather than doing deep-focused work.”

He is also no fan of presence indicators: “It sounds harmless but it creates an invisible leash,” he says, as people may feel judged for taking the time to think, go for a walk or eat lunch without their laptop. “The green dot becomes a proxy for the question, ‘Are you working?’, and it turns availability into a performance metric, rewards being perpetually interruptible over being productive.”

Coleman says that, ideally, human resources (HR) professionals would be involved in decisions over business software, although IT procurement processes are rarely designed to support this. “Technology decision are behaviour decisions. If you are choosing a collaboration platform like Slack or Monday.com or Teams, you are not just choosing the feature set, you are really making a decision about what your employees’ workday feels like. That should be relevant to an HR team or a People team.”

Technology should be an enabler of performance and productivity, rather than adding to people’s workload and creating stress

David D’Souza, director of profession at the CIPD, the professional body for HR, takes a similar view. “People should be at the heart of thinking around technology, and the role technology plays is central to the way we think about the performance and development of people in the workplace,” he says.

“Our findings around ‘techno-stress’ suggest that there’s no clear link between digital working and wellbeing, but factors such as a lack of boundaries around technology use can lead to staff feeling pressure to be ‘always on’ and struggle to switch off,” D’Souza adds. “Education, expectation and setting standards are key to ensuring that people are in a position to give their best, and organisations should be committed to finding the right solution for their context. Technology should be an enabler of performance and productivity, rather than adding to people’s workload and creating stress.” 

A few companies have combined their leadership of IT and HR, including US vaccine-maker Moderna. D’Souza says that a merger is challenging given the different skills required, but a positive collaborative relationship is essential.

“I think HR and IT ultimately have the same goal: make workplaces work,” says Meg Donovan, chief people officer of employee experience software company Nexthink. “Digital wellbeing is a shared responsibility between HR and IT.”

She says this goes wider than the design of specific applications, such as reliability: “If I was talking to a multimillion-dollar potential client and the internet went down five times during that call, they might not be willing to listen to me and I might lose that sale.”

Research by Nexthink using telemetry data from 474 of its customers gathered in May 2025 found that employees experienced an average of 14 technology-based disruptions every week, including crashes and blue screens of death. The average disruption lasted for 167 seconds, enough to hit people’s quality of work and make errors more likely.

Donovan says that technologies such as presence indicators can be useful if an organisation has the right culture, as they can help collaboration by showing how likely you are to get a quick response. A small fraction of staff abuse such systems by always setting the indicator to ‘do not disturb’: “It’s probably the same number of managers who are using that red light indicator as a performance metric. Neither end of that spectrum is OK,” she says.

Similarly, tools such as Slack or Teams that combine messaging and input from multiple applications can lessen digital fatigue by providing a single interface rather than staff having to open different applications.

Like Megawarne and Coleman, Donovan sees organisational culture as a key element in how business software affects staff. Nexthink does not have a formal policy on working outside office hours: “We don’t have a policy because I don’t think we necessarily need one. There’s not an expectation that people are answering emails at two in the morning or 10 o’clock at night,” she says. “Because we’re a Swiss-based, a European-based organisation, we have a really healthy respect for people’s boundaries outside of working hours. Culturally, that’s just part of our DNA.”