Better Being Series: Are You Taking Care of Your Digital Wellbeing?

Intro:
Hi everyone, and welcome to the award-winning “On Aon” podcast, where we dive into some of the most pressing topics that businesses and organizations around the world are facing. This week in a special series on resilience called Better Being, we hear from Rachel Fellowes, Aon’s Chief Wellbeing Officer with her guest, Amy Blankson, on digital wellbeing in the modern workplace.

Rachel Fellows:
Hello, and welcome to Better Being with me, Rachel Fellowes. I'm the Chief Wellbeing Officer here at Aon, and unsurprisingly, I'm passionate about wellbeing and human sustainability in the workplace. Now globally, an estimated 12 billion working days are lost every year due to depression and anxiety, and this costs us around $1 trillion U.S. dollars annually in lost productivity. Curiously, only 30 percent of us identify as resilient, and burnout is also on the rise. As a result, wellbeing has quickly moved the top of companies priorities lists with 83 percent of companies now saying they have a wellbeing strategy in place. How organizations prioritize and integrate wellbeing can have a profound impact on employee engagement, talent recruitment, and retention, as well as overall business results. So, it's more important than ever to get this right. A wellbeing strategy needs to include physical, emotional, social, financial and career elements. And so, in this series, I take a look at what makes for better being at work with thought leaders and subject matter experts.

So in today's episode, we're talking about something I believe to be a topic of increasing importance, that is, digital wellbeing. And in a world where not only are we more and more online than ever before, we're also spending longer periods online because our professional and personal lives are moving into the digital space. So, think of the growth of hybrid working as well as the use of social media and how we learn to manage ourselves and how that plays out into our wellbeing.

So, with me today to discuss this is the amazing Amy Blankson. Amy is the Co-Founder and Chief Evangelist, I love that title for a start, of the Digital Wellness Institute. She's also a happiness expert, speaker and bestselling author of the Future of Happiness. But it gets better. The final part of the introduction reflects the fact that Amy was selected to be a member of the UN Global Happiness Council and is the only person to have ever received a Point of Light award from two U.S. Presidents. Absolutely incredible, Amy. Thank you so much for being here. It was a privilege to have you with us.

Amy Blankson:
Oh, thank you so much for having me, Rachel.

Rachel Fellows:
So, I know in our chat we're going to explore a number of things starting with the most obvious, talking about what is digital wellness or digital wellbeing, and then progressing into why this matters for our lives and in the workplace, and also start to integrate something which I find fascinating called, digital flourishing. So, for those of us who are making assumptions around what digital wellbeing is, can we start with that initial question, the obvious one, what is it? And then lead into why you set up the Digital Wellness Institute?

Amy Blankson:
Digital wellbeing is the opportunity that we have to maximize the benefits of technology while mitigating the harms that come along with it. In short, it's all about finding balance in our lives. And for us, we started the Digital Wellness Institute in 2018 with the mindset that organizations in particular needed help navigating the digital era, all of the changes that have happened and emerged so rapidly in our organizations, that intuitively we felt, whether it's Zoom fatigue or it's the ergonomics of our workstations, or it's just the ever-present experience of being around screens, we felt that those individuals needed a gauge, a metric to be able to understand how digitally well they were and when they needed to invest in their own health and wellbeing in order to come back to a place of stasis or even better, a place of digital flourishing.

Rachel Fellows:
My mind is going off in so many different directions, Amy, I'm thinking, "Gosh, I'm a mother. I've got a 4-year-old, but she's not at the social media stage, and I'm super scared as to how I think of managing that."

I also heard the fact you've got 2018 pre-pandemic. You must have seen absolutely fascinating progression of the topic through 2020 and beyond. You also mentioned the reality that this is work relevant, and I'd really like to dig into that more if that's okay. So, in particular, thinking about how the conversation has developed in that space, is there anything you've seen in the data and the observations in particular in the last few years around impact of hybrid working by way of example?

Amy Blankson:
I hear from employees all of the time that are expressing some of the frustrations of digital overwhelm or what's being called techno stress. We hear 83 percent of employees are turning to their employers looking for help navigating tech-life balance. And the employers are turning to us saying, "I have no idea what to do because I feel the same stresses and pressures." And it's very hard to step off of the treadmill when the entire world is on it together. And so, what we work with organizations on is how to both help measure and define digital culture within an organization, but really also to then change practices, policies, and even some of the language that we use in organizations to help provide additional clarity, really to support the employees as well.

And you bring up an important point, Rachel, that is typically when we think about digital wellness, we think of our children or our teenagers. We think of young people who are being really irresponsible on technology and maybe spending far too long surfing TikTok or YouTube. But the reason why we chose to focus on adults is because there's actually a separate and very important part of this conversation in that young people are often associated with irresponsible tech use. The adults that I work with are often high performers and I associate them with hyper-responsible tech use, meaning that they don't want to miss an email, they're trying to get to inbox zero, they want to be the first person to respond, even if that means staying up till midnight to check their email one more time. And that dynamic is one that is very quietly undergirding a lot of that dynamics, particularly around hybrid work, flexible work. We love the benefits of flexible work, but there is a real cost to it that I think it's time that employers, and in particular leaders, begin to call out and talk about.

Rachel Fellows:
I love that. You've even made me call myself out, I think, because I'm so obsessed with making sure my daughter has a maximum of 20 minutes a day on technology, and I'm sitting here for 14 hours on technology. I love the irony. That's brilliant.

My mind also went to, and maybe we can just dig into it a little bit more, this concept of distraction. Because the habits we cultivate transcend work or life, or if you even want to put those two things in separate buckets. But my husband and I often play a game. So, we go out for dinner or we're sitting in an airport and we say, "Could we be the only couple not on our phone?" And that's an adult to adult peer review. And it's actually surprising how often we are, and I'm not saying we're always good at it. But I'd love to dig into this addiction, the hyper-response mode. It isn't just at work and what impact that has on personal relationships. Could we go there?