Wellbeing is a multidimensional concept that can be seen as balance between the psychological, social, and physical resources that an individual owns and his psychological, social, and physical challenges. Despite digital technologies becoming widespread and deeply rooted in our daily lives, there is increasing interest in debating the benefits and downsides they bring, not only in the personal life but also in the professional environment. This chapter explores the definition, dynamics, and strategies of wellbeing in the workplace, especially within the digital context, and suggests best practices for a good balance between personal and professional lives.
TopWhy Is Wellbeing Important?
According to Scaria et al. (2020), despite it’s a concept that was “addressed thousands of years ago, starting with Plato, Socrates, Epicurus and Aristotle” (p. 4), the word “wellness” appeared for the first time written in English in 1654, as opposite of “illness” (that combines “ness” to “ill”), by adding “ness” to “well”, and therefore, designating the state of being well, or the absence of disease. Although it’s early origins, the concept only gained momentum from the 80’s of the last century with the growth of the idea that wellness should be more about promoting health instead of just preventing diseases.
Wassell and Dodge (2015) stated that wellbeing is a multidimensional concept, that can be seen as balance between the resources (psychological, social, and physical) that an individual possesses, versus his psychological, social, and physical challenges. To the authors, several factors contribute to wellbeing, namely physical health, happiness, work-life balance, work environment, social support, education, and security, all each item with different levels of resources and challenges (p. 97).
For Mary Brandt (2020), the ultimate reason why take care of wellbeing is so important is to prevent four kinds of losses: personal, institutional, societal, and the meaning and purpose. In personal losses, the author includes physical health, healthy lifestyle, mental health, relationships, employment, and life. On the Institutional perspective, includes losses of employees, productivity, and customer satisfaction, quality, and safety. All these losses are relevant in the environmental workplace at several levels. By losing any of the referred components in the personal life, the balance of the worker is affected and its consequences often leading to profound losses for institutions and, in the end, to society as a whole. Finally, the misalignment of core values between the individual and the company, also known as person-organization (PO) misfit, besides the deviant behaviors, as well as increasing turnover intentions and lower performance, also affects employees’ performance, job satisfaction or organizational commitment (Brown et al., 2020), and many times results in loss of meaning and purpose, that means loss of a life well-lived.
Besides that, one cannot assume that wellbeing in workplace is always connected to work-based situations, as many times employees are experiencing individual conflicts related to their own private lives, as family, health, social, financial, or community issues, among others, that influences their life balance. This way, even in the work environment, wellbeing needs to be contextualized in a holistic standpoint, encompassing all aspects of the worker’s life (Cvenkel, 2020).
Another unavoidable aspect is the increasing use of technology in the workplace. This reality helped, in most cases, to improve working efficiency and reduced physical human effort, increasing therefore the living conditions of the employees, but it was also a generator of anxiety and stress (McClure, 2018). As stated by Griep et al. (2021), in the actual economic context, the increasing use of technology made the boundaries between private and working life being every day more blurred, giving rise to the need of understand and study the wellbeing in the digital context.
TopWhat Is Digital Wellbeing?
Throughout history, technological development has always aroused polarized reactions between enthusiasm for progress and the expectation of improved quality of life, and reluctance, criticism or even rejection based on the fear of negative effects or nostalgia in the face of imminent change. In Communication Sciences, the relationship between human beings, society and technology has been discussed between technological determinism and social constructivism, between media panics and technological optimism (Fuglsang, 2001). However, the most contemporary approaches are based on the recognition of a constant and intricate dynamic between the affordances that each new technology provides and stimulates (Gibson, 1979), and the appropriation that each user makes of them (Silverstone & Haddon, 1996). This dynamic has been studied and questioned from perspectives and contributions that cross risks and benefits, and that seek to understand how each of us can participate in the digital world in a conscious, informed, responsible, critical, and beneficial way.