Using Employee Data to Make Work Healthier

8 min read

The original article was published in Tagesspiegel 

Digitalization has been leading to increased work intensification and increasing psychological stress in companies for decades, says Robert Peters from the Institute for Innovation and Technology. In order to counteract the resulting high levels of sick leave, he argues in his opinion that digitalization and employee data should be used differently - namely for healthier work

It is something like the natural law of the digital working world: with each wave of digitization, the psychological workload for employees increases . This has been observed with high continuity for decades. In many companies, the motto is: "Thanks to digital tools, a task can be completed in half the time? Perfect! Then employees will be able to complete twice as many tasks in the future." The result: work intensification and thus a structural intensification of psychological workload. The burden could be reduced through job crafting. The use of (employee) data can support job crafting and strengthen employees' self-efficacy. Data protection does not have to become a brake on this.

Using digital dividends for employees

The triple jump of digitization, work intensification and psychological stress is so obvious that one may ask: Why have we not been able to break this trend even after decades? To understand this, it is worth taking a step back and looking closely at the structural mechanism underlying this spiral of mental overload : Digital innovations are predominantly developed with the aim of making processes more efficient - for example by automating routine activities. The introduction of digital tools often frees up time and personnel resources. These freed-up resources are part of the so-called digital dividend. And employers have been reaping this dividend unilaterally for decades.

Criticizing this was taboo for a long time. Today, the line of conflict no longer runs so clearly along the social partners of employers and employees. The reason: the consequences of work intensification and increasing psychological stress have long been felt negatively by companies too.

This was also made clear this month at Europe's largest human resources fair, "Zukunft Personal Europe" in Cologne. The opening panel was entitled " The Era of Great Exhaustion ". Strategies for dealing with phenomena such as quiet quitting and quiet vacationing were hotly debated . A recent study by the German Economic Institute (IW) showed how expensive increased sick leave , which is also caused by mental stress, is for companies: the record level of sick leave costs companies in Germany 76.7 billion euros per year in continued wage payments alone.

Job crafting as a solution? How data helps

So the time is right to finally talk seriously about how we can reverse the trend: away from work that makes people ill, and towards good, healthy work. Job crafting can be an important part of the solution. Job crafting means that employees adapt their work so that it meets their individual needs as much as possible. This has immediate benefits in terms of health. A study by the Barmer Ersatzkasse and the University of St. Gallen shows that people who do a lot of job crafting rate their health 11 percent higher than employees who do not design their work as much themselves. Data-based technologies in particular can help to improve the quality of work of employees in the future and thus make a contribution to good, healthy work. Our team at the Institute for Innovation and Technology (IIT) was able to demonstrate this in a study commissioned by the Federal Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs. Data-based technologies can help to adapt work environments and processes even more to the individual needs of employees.

More independence and self-determination

Data-based technologies can empower employees collectively and individually to shape things and strengthen self-efficacy . What requirements do employees have in terms of the quantity and quality of rooms, (IT) infrastructure and other operational resources? Needs can be better assessed based on usage data from office space, video conference systems and other resources . If employees have access to this information, they can independently develop suggestions for improvement and drive them forward more effectively because they are empowered to make evidence-based decisions themselves. Digital twins of virtual and physical work processes could make workflows and collaboration within the company transparent in the future and thus shapeable.

Data-based approaches can also contribute to greater self-efficacy among employees in relation to career development : What skills will be required in my job in five to ten years? Data-based "skill gap" analyses can be carried out, which give me individual advice on necessary adaptation qualifications. Anyone who wants to change careers and aim for a horizontal job change within the company (for example from controlling to the HR department) could in future receive a personal career roadmap with individual further training and continuing education offers. The highlight: employees and companies would benefit equally from such approaches. Because if employees can have a greater say in their own work, this has a positive effect on their commitment and increases their ability to innovate.

Complexity and data silos as hurdles

While data-based technologies hold considerable potential for job crafting for employees and companies, a look at practice shows that companies still primarily rely on the automation of standard processes in the area of ​​human resources. The main focus is on the efficiency of the "bread-and-butter business". Technologies that would be able to identify talent, develop them in a targeted manner and offer them a long-term perspective are viewed with caution. This is shown by the Future Report HR-Tech 2024 , which our team from the Institute for Innovation and Technology presented together with partners a few days ago .

There are reasons for this: those systems that support job crafting based on data are characterized by a relatively high level of complexity. In many cases, the data sources required for this would first have to be accessed. If the relevant information is already available, it is often still tied up in proprietary silos. At the very least, the necessary interoperability is lacking. In addition, many companies do not have the skills required for such ambitious innovation projects in their HR departments. In short: data-based systems for job crafting are complex and you cannot just buy them off the shelf.

Laziness of thought: The fairy tale of data protection as a showstopper

Another reason why data innovations for job crafting have so far hardly been put into practice: data that effectively supports job crafting is almost always personal or personally identifiable. This automatically sets off alarm bells in many companies. There is a feeling that as soon as data protection comes into play, nothing works. In this narrative, the works council is seen as a problem bear anyway. However, anyone who immediately dismisses it because employee data has to be collected and processed for a certain system reveals a shocking lack of thinking. If you delve deeper and talk to practitioners from HR departments and works councils, you repeatedly come across examples in which employee representatives are committed to using employee data or even evaluating it at the individual level (for example to develop comprehensive competency maps).

In some cases, the whole thing fails because of the employer side, for example if the necessary resources are not made available. Decision-makers in companies should therefore see works councils as "partners in crime" in the implementation of data-based innovations in the human resources area. On the technical side, too, the fear of collecting and evaluating employee data is an expression of a certain laziness of thought. Data governance in the company that follows clear ethical standards and technical approaches such as distributed data storage, federated learning and differential privacy give companies the tools they need to implement data innovations, even when personal or personally identifiable data is involved.

Don’t talk – do!

So what are we waiting for? Sickness rates are skyrocketing. The next digitalization push is just around the corner in the form of generative AI. Based on everything we know today, ChatGPT & Co will also increase the psychological burden on employees. So let's finally use the potential of data-based technologies to empower employees to shape their work environment and processes! Self-efficacy in terms of work and career is the foundation for a healthy working society.