The impact of constant connectivity on employees' well-being: a data donation pilot study

In the knowledge economy, the use of digital platforms, e.g., Slack, to connect employers among each other is extensive, to the point that thousands of teams worldwide employ them. Next to the advantages of such platforms, which enable to connect people who work remotely and also to carve out space for entertainment and release, the inherent danger of these tools is that they blur the boundaries between work and personal life. This constant connectivity, defined as a constant availability to the work organisation beyond working hours, can be detrimental for worker’s well-being because it lowers psychological detachment, e.g., taking (mental) breaks from work, which is important for employees to restore energy (Büchler et al., 2020 [1]). The detrimental effect could be attenuated by a preference for integration (i.e., when individuals like to have blurry boundaries between work and private life) instead of segmentation (i.e., when individuals prefer to keep work and private life separate).
In this study, we replicate part of Buchler et al. 2020’s findings using novel data. We investigate whether constant connectivity has a detrimental effect on employees’ well-being mediated by psychological detachment, and we also investigate whether this effect is stronger for segmenters (vs. integrators). To answer our question, we use a combination of survey data and actual Slack access logs, acquired via data donation using the D3I infrastructure, which allows us to quantify how much individual employees connect to work via Slack outside of their working hours. In this way, we further improve on the original study by being able to compare self-reported to actual constant connectivity. The use of digital trace data to measure constant connectivity in this context may allow us to better quantify and understand an important phenomenon of nowadays’ work environments, whereby self-reported measures may be inaccurate due to recall bias.