State of the Heart: Is connecting more via technology harming our emotional resilience?
In their 2024 State of the Heart report, Six Seconds revealed a sharp decline in global emotional intelligence and a rise in burnout and disengagement at work since the pandemic.
While the reasons for these findings are many, one that can’t be overlooked is the role of technology, both at work and in our daily lives. Since 2020 we’ve all become used to connecting more via video calls and remote working software. And while those tools are rightly hailed for opening doors to hybrid work models and global client relationships, they haven’t been without their downsides.
It’s not too late for that decline to be reversed. To unpack how, we spoke to Paula Abramovicz Erlich, Managing Partner of TPC Leadership in Brazil, and Laurent Jacquet, Partner at TPC Leadership in Belgium and the Netherlands.
Greater connectivity can be a double edged sword
One of the key findings from the State of the Heart report was that we are facing something of a human energy crisis. Reported relationship and wellbeing levels were at their lowest since 2018, and only 23% of employees said they felt engaged by their work.
It should be no surprise that this decline comes when we’re spending more time than ever connected by technology. While video calls, Whatsapps and social media can make it feel like we’re interacting more, they also mean those interactions are briefer and less personal.
“You need to ask how much time you spend in your day connecting as people, and look at the quality of those connections,” Laurent says. “Often conversations become too transactional, about our progress or the status of a project, but we’re missing out on the human-to-human element that gives us our energy.”
This doesn’t just impact our energy in the moments when we’re actually communicating with each other. Our ever-growing web of tech connections means we’re usually bouncing out of one video call and straight into another, with no pause in between to ward off overstimulation.
“When we’re sitting in back-to-back online meetings all day, that doesn’t leave us a lot of time to pause in between and reflect on those interactions,” Paula says. “Before Zoom we’d have time to reflect on the drive to and from meetings, or to connect with each other in the pre- and post-meeting chatter.”
The more remote we are, the more we need to come together
The way to reverse this human energy crisis is to bring back more of the deeper, personal levels of our interactions at work – and that means teams have to be spending more time in person.
“After Covid we swung the pendulum towards being 100% online, and people are resisting coming back to work physically,” Paula says. “But there’s a better balance to be found somewhere in the middle.”
That doesn’t mean calling for an end to remote or hybrid working altogether. For one thing, employers would likely face a revolt if they tried – McKinsey found in 2023 that 4 out of 5 employees who had tried hybrid models wanted to keep them. For another, hybrid or remote working is nothing less than a necessity for many employees with disabilities or reduced access to childcare, for example.
What it does mean is that organizations need to be investing more in finding ways to keep their teams connected on a human level, not just with Slack and Zoom.
That might look like moving from a totally remote model to spending one or two days in the office, so that team members don’t miss out on the social bonding that happens between desks or during breaks. Or it might be leaders planning more social events like retreats and team days throughout the year, giving everyone a chance to be people and not just coworkers.
Whatever the case, the crucial element is intentionality. It’s not the office setting itself that helps employees build emotional intelligence and restore their resilience – it’s the people they see there and the interactions they have with them. Even for organizations that are already in-office, keeping that intentionality matters.
As Laurent says, “Organizations could try to bring people into the office more, but if all they do while they’re there is have virtual meetings and conversations via chat messages, that doesn’t help them bond.”
Equipping employees to keep up with tech changes
When we talk about tech in the workplace and its impact on our emotional intelligence and resilience, it’s important to remember that tech isn’t just about messaging and video calls.
Whether it’s automation and artificial intelligence replacing parts of a person’s job or productivity management tools for tracking time and resourcing, technology is changing how we work more than ever before. And at the rate those changes are coming, it’s so easy for employees to feel overwhelmed, unable to keep up and busier than ever.
The more overwhelmed they feel by work, the less they’ll want to work on restoring their energy for it. As Laurent says, “You can tell someone who’s burned out that going to bed at 10pm will help them be in a good shape for the next day, but if you hate your job you’re not going to want to feel refreshed for it.”
All this means that leaders need to make sure their teams are better equipped to handle the technological changes and triggers coming their way. They need to fully understand the impact any changes will have on their teams, and make sure they’re putting the right training in place so that employees don’t feel like they’re being left behind.
But before even that stage, leaders need to interrogate how their teams are using technology, and what technological changes they’re planning to make. It’s easy to get swept up in the hype of what a new tool can do for connectivity and productivity, but you have to be ready to take a step back and ask whether it will end up contributing to burnout and disconnection instead.
This kind of interrogation is one of the reasons why we at TPC Leadership have always resisted adding technology to our coaching practice for the sake of it. Not because we’re anti-tech, but because coaching depends so much on the human-to-human connections that get lost if everyone is constantly separated by a screen.
Ultimately, the role that technology plays in the current state of our emotional intelligence is too complicated to say it’s wholly good or wholly bad. But in the face of a human energy crisis, leaders will need to recognize and embrace that nuance, to plan for it and to support their employees to handle it.
They’ll need to think critically about where technology helps employees and where it hinders. And they’ll need to take a more vertical approach to leadership<link to Blog 02 in series> that considers the human-to-human bonds that teams need to thrive, and what’s needed to make sure those bonds are formed.
