The Impact of Email Overload on Psychological Safety in the Workplace

Recent years have seen a growing international movement promoting the concept of providing employees with a psychologically healthy workplace (PHW). PHW refers to the enhancement of workplace factors that foster employee mental health and wellbeing and therefore enhance organisational performance and productivity outcomes.

Under Australian occupational health and safety laws, employers are responsible for providing a safe workplace for their staff. More and more this is seen as more than just the traditional emphasis on physical safety, but on psychological safety as well.

One of the main threats to psychological safety is the volume of email that employees are expected to handle on a daily basis and, increasingly, the workload that results from these new messages. Keeping up with all the new inputs we receive from a wide range of technological devices takes up a lot of our time each day.

This occurs not only at work but also during our personal time; it seems we’re communicating ourselves into a frenzy. And it’s affecting our mental health in the following ways:

• Stress

• Chronic distraction

• Attention Deficit Disorder

• Lowered IQ

All the best!

Steuart G. Snooks