Artificial intelligence was expected to free employees from repetitive and time-consuming tasks, shorten working hours and reduce stress. Instead, the technology designed to relieve pressure is often making people work faster and more intensively, while the boundary between working time and personal time is gradually disappearing.
Employees are finding it increasingly difficult to disconnect from their responsibilities, even after their formal working day has ended.
As technology advances, constant availability is becoming a new currency in the labour market. The easier it becomes to contact someone through digital tools, the more frequently an immediate response is treated as an informal expectation.
Many employees are paying for a sense of professional security and job stability with their availability, responding to messages even outside normal working hours.
“The latest technologies, including artificial intelligence, entered companies with the great promise of helping us ‘reclaim time’ and making our lives easier. In practice, however, the hours saved rarely return to employees as space for rest or creativity,” said Magda Pietkiewicz, labour market expert and founder of Enpulse, a modern HR platform used to monitor and develop employee engagement.
“If AI allows us to prepare a complex analysis in 20 or 30 minutes instead of an hour, the natural reaction is often to immediately move on to the next task. Instead of consciously using the saved time to rest, organise priorities or focus on work requiring deeper concentration, we enter a spiral of never-ending assignments.”
She added that employees gradually stop setting boundaries and treat growing productivity as a signal that they can take on even more work.
“As a result, we do indeed work faster, but not necessarily more intelligently. Over time, we lose awareness not only of the mistakes we make but also of our own working habits. We give up breaks, ignore signs of fatigue and increasingly fail to leave space for recovery,” Pietkiewicz said.
“This is precisely the mechanism through which technology intended to relieve pressure can paradoxically contribute to exhaustion and a gradual decline in engagement.”
Technostress and pressure to avoid mistakes
The impact of modern technologies on the workplace has two sides.
According to the OECD, approximately 80% of employees using AI report that it has improved their productivity. However, this optimisation also carries hidden costs.
The same research points to the risk of increasing the intensity and pace of work. Employees are also concerned that new tools may lead to closer monitoring of their work, working hours and performance, while limiting their freedom to make decisions.
Pressure becomes particularly intense when algorithms are used to manage employees and evaluate their results.
Technological progress has also dramatically increased the amount of information people are required to process each day.
Information overload creates feelings of being overwhelmed and frustrated. It is also contributing to the rise of so-called technostress, a form of stress caused by excessive use of modern technologies and the pressure to remain permanently online.
Technostress results partly from difficulties in adapting to the digital environment and can manifest itself through fatigue, concentration problems and a sense of constant pressure.
“The pace of innovation is now so rapid that, as human beings, we are physically unable to acquire new skills as quickly as new applications and systems appear and are upgraded,” Pietkiewicz explained.
“Before we are able to fully master one system, we are already expected to be proficient in a newer and more complicated version. This creates a vicious circle in which employees constantly feel that they are running out of time and fear that their skills will soon become outdated.”
Despite promises of a major revolution, working with artificial intelligence also has a darker side: AI hallucinations.
Language models and advanced algorithms can generate false, illogical or entirely fabricated information while presenting it with complete confidence.
For employees, this means having to take on the role of a meticulous auditor of the machine. Awareness that a system may insert hidden errors into a professionally presented report requires permanent vigilance and a limited-trust approach.
“Employees want to perform their duties reliably, but this objective clashes with the fundamental imperfections of AI tools,” Pietkiewicz said.
“Market tests show that algorithms can fabricate information in a significant percentage of cases. This creates a substantial psychological burden.”
Employees are often under time pressure while simultaneously being expected to identify every hidden error generated by the system.
“They know that ultimately it is the employee, not the machine, whose name appears on the work and who bears full business responsibility for it,” she continued.
“The need to constantly supervise technology that only appears to be intelligent means that, instead of reducing stress, AI frequently becomes a new source of it.”
Workplace FOMO and the never-ending working day
Another aspect of the problem is the widespread culture of constant availability, symbolised by the smartphone carried in almost every employee’s pocket.
Messaging platforms have made it increasingly difficult for work to end when an employee logs off their computer.
Technology can accelerate the completion of tasks, but it also reinforces an “always-on” culture in which an almost immediate reply becomes the standard.
Some organisations are even introducing guidelines specifying how quickly an employee should respond to a message, sometimes requiring a response within only a few hours.
Such expectations mean that constant availability is increasingly treated as a sign of professionalism. At the same time, the boundary between working time and personal time becomes progressively less distinct.
The Microsoft Work Trend Index describes this phenomenon as the “Infinite Workday” — a working day that never truly ends because emails, messages and notifications arrive asynchronously throughout the entire day and night.
The scale of this phenomenon is illustrated by the figures. The average office employee receives 117 emails and 153 Teams messages each day.
Their concentration is interrupted, on average, every two minutes by a message, notification or meeting.
Furthermore, 40% of employees check their work email before 6 a.m., while approximately 29% return to it at around 10 p.m.
The concept of FOMO, or the Fear of Missing Out, was traditionally associated with social media and anxiety about missing social events. Today, it is increasingly being discussed in a professional context.
“The mobile phone has become a portable command centre and a symbol of constant professional readiness,” Pietkiewicz said.
“FOMO means that employees continue to refresh their inbox even while on holiday or during the weekend, fearing that missing a message may be interpreted by their manager or client as a lack of engagement or may lead to a loss of control over a project.”
In times of economic uncertainty, 24-hour availability has become an unwritten currency that employees use to purchase a sense of security and job stability.
“The price, however, is permanent exhaustion,” she added.
The concentration crisis and fragmented attention
The paradox of the modern office is that tools designed to save time often become some of its greatest consumers.
The contemporary working day has become a constant struggle to maintain concentration.
Switching between dozens of applications, monitoring several communication channels simultaneously and immediately reacting to a constant stream of notifications all consume employees’ most valuable resource: time.
Continuous context switching sharply reduces productivity and almost entirely removes opportunities for deep, uninterrupted work from everyday office life.
Instead of completing complex assignments, employees become trapped in an illusion of multitasking that increases fatigue and creates substantial pressure.
One consequence of this constant overstimulation is a phenomenon sometimes described as “popcorn brain”.
This refers to a state in which the brain, accustomed to a constant flood of notifications, chaotically jumps from one topic to another and loses the ability to engage in deep, uninterrupted work.
“An inability to achieve deep concentration combined with constant interruptions is a recipe for chaos,” Pietkiewicz said.
“Companies must begin by organising their own working environments. The first step should be to reduce the number of applications being used and introduce blocks of time during the day dedicated to concentrated work, free from meetings and excessive notifications.”
Only after companies regain control over employees’ attention can they sensibly introduce advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence.
This process requires transparent rules governing the use of available tools as well as practical training designed to prevent confidential data leaks and the uncritical copying of inaccurate AI-generated content.
“Technology should relieve pressure on employees, but a healthy organisational culture must create the conditions that allow it to do so,” Pietkiewicz stressed.
A systemic way out of digital chaos
In an era of permanent information overload and digital pressure, one of the key tasks facing corporate management teams is the responsible management of workplace culture.
According to Eurofound data, as many as 45% of employees believe that being contacted outside working hours has a negative effect on their work-life balance and health.
Among employees who are frequently contacted about work during their personal time, more than 40% report headaches. Other common symptoms include chronic fatigue, stress and anxiety.
At the same time, the research indicates that organisations introducing clear rules allowing employees to disconnect after working hours — commonly described as the right to disconnect — record satisfaction and engagement levels that are more than ten percentage points higher than those of companies that leave the issue unregulated.
“The data clearly show that the problem does not lie solely in technology but in organisational culture,” Pietkiewicz said.
“Genuine engagement develops in an environment that provides psychological safety, not one in which responding to an email at 11 p.m. is treated as proof of loyalty.”
Managerial experience, common sense and the ability to critically verify information generated by a computer are skills that no algorithm is likely to replace quickly.
“It is time to understand that technology should serve people, rather than people serving technology,” Pietkiewicz concluded.
“Companies that fail to introduce systemic boundaries around the digital intensity of work will lose their greatest talent as a result of overload and exhaustion.”
Source: Managerplus.pl
