Too much ‘engagement’ kills my work day

Working and collaborating digitally has become more important than ever. While most companies already had a digital workplace or Intranet in place, it got a much more prominent tool in the work day of many people. With the rise of remote and hybrid work companies came to see the need for a good digital workplace strategy. Providing employees with a good digital workplace is important for a few reasons: it supports collaboration and provides easy access to the tools and information you need for your daily work. Working from home should not only be possible, it should also be effective, productive and engaging. But exactly this is where the shoe pinches.

Working from home comes with pros and cons. Many of us experience flexibility and efficiency being more in charge of their work hours and being able to combine work and personal tasks. But as a downside I saw a lot of colleagues working late and skipping their lunch breaks because of the big number of online meetings. I myself struggled with the feeling of having to be available all the time and finding it hard to disconnect from work at the end of the day.

So now I’m thinking, should we really be happy with this development in digital employee experience? Where will it be heading towards in the coming years?

On the one hand there is the importance of employee engagement, having fun, feeling connected on the digital work floor and collaborating efficiently with your colleagues. And on the other hand, we struggle with being easily distracted and having a hard time to separate work and personal life. How can we find a balance? And how can we, as designers, create digital workplaces that help people to find and protect that balance?

In my work as a UX designer, I came across a lot of intranet examples and intranet software with a huge number of features. These features can roughly be divided into two categories: information and communication. The information part is mostly about making the tools and information for your work accessible and easy to find (like a good search engine). The communication part is about the company communication, culture and employee collaboration (like a notification hub). The trend in this last category is what worries me.

Of course it is important to enable employees to get into contact with each other. But all these platforms use standard social media features as a basis. These communication tools often use a bunch of social features such as a personalized feed with AI recommended content, following, liking, tagging and push notifications. Great for engagement. But what about the negative side effects of social media? A few examples:

• Notifications make the trivial seem urgent. The brain automatically redirects our attention to these notifications. This results in distraction, difficulty focusing and over time a reduction of attention span.
• The possibility of commenting or liking keeps us in a state of high alert. The brain gets a dose of dopamine for each like or comment and keeps us compulsively monitoring for updates.
• Features like infinite scroll and AI driven content keep us continuously engaged. These mechanisms make us stay longer on these platforms than we intended.

Altogether, these social features may not be ideal for employees who want to focus on their work. Another thing to keep in mind, is that the intranet platform is not the only communication tool within a company. Most companies also use separate tools for e-mail (like Outlook) and chat (like Teams or Slack). When a combination of all these communication tools is used, the amount of notifications and distractions can be overwhelming.

Also, a lot of software comes with tools to measure the employee engagement on the intranet. This is measured by for instance page views, created posts, likes and comments. In my opinion the goal of an intranet should not be to create as much engagement as possible, but to create valuable engagement. Like people finding the information they need for their work and contacting the colleagues they need to collaborate with. Why would you want to keep your employees on the intranet as much as possible? Isn’t it more useful to let them do their work? For many people, finishing a job feels more satisfying as well.

Careful with notifications

To prevent users from a constant distraction from notifications, a few things should be considered:

• Keep in mind that with every notification, the user is distracted for a certain amount of time. Consciously choose whether a notification is needed and only send notifications when the information is relevant for the user.
• Make it easy and findable for the user to turn off notifications. Or turn off notifications by default and have users choose for themselves if they want to turn them on.
• Use notification schedules and make it easy for users to choose from standard timings: for instance, once a week, once a day, immediately.
• Provide your workplace with a set of rules taking into account if the user is busy with a focus intensive task or not.

From engagement to values

Apart from the above suggestions, I think it is important to not let the success of your platform depend on engagement only. Instead, think about the core values of your organisation and start from those. Responsibility, inclusiveness and good employment practices. Find out whether your platform and its features match with these values, for instance by user tests with employees or by taking surveys. If you do this well, it will not only result in a platform in which employees can be productive and feel connected to each other and your company, they will also experience a much better work-life balance.