Briefing Paper: What impact does exposure to workplace technologies have on workers' quality of life?
Creators: name: Soffia, Magdalena
name: Skordis, Jolene
name: Zhou, Xingzuo
name: Leiva-Granados, Rolando
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024
Subjects: Wellbeing
Technology
Quality of Life
Work

description: How people feel about work is important. Work is more than the single most important determinant of living standards. Work is the thread that connects individual lives with their communities and the economy. Work can promote social relationships, forge connections of mutual support and foster collaboration, binding together our capabilities with the environmental conditions that can either promote - or diminish - individual and collective flourishing. Work and wellbeing are inextricably connected - and as we shape the future of our work, we shape the future of our wellbeing too.

However, research and public policy have tended to treat technology and wellbeing separately, and disproportionately focus on job loss and employment. Far less attention has been given to how workplace technologies are impacting job quality, and workers’ quality of life.

In practice, beyond job loss, there are a range of types of automation which affect risks and impacts to job quality and quality of life in varied ways - including how different people experience them, and where they are experienced (Gilbert, 2023). This means that the same technology can have both positive and negative impacts. Some newer technologies improve the flexibility of work arrangements - while also increasing surveillance, which is experienced negatively. It follows that technological and workplace transformations will change the quality of our work and lives in many and varied ways. 

Looking into the past, concepts of wellbeing have tended to be poorly and inconsistently conceptualised, resulting in, for example, general findings about ‘stress’ or ‘burnout’, with little insight into the causes of consequences of that stress. Past studies have also tended to take a narrow view of technology types, making it harder to disentangle these links, or their interaction.

It is important that these factors are unpicked and highlighted to policymakers and business leaders. Among other reasons, people are highly likely to interact with innovative technologies and experience significant impacts from them in the high-stakes environment of work. It follows that having a better understanding of positive and negative impacts on workers, their variation and the different trade-offs, is vital if we are to have a workforce that is healthy and happy – shaping better outcomes for everyone.

This briefing outlines new work that has been done for the IFOW Pissarides Review into the Future of Work and Wellbeing to meet these significant evidential and policy challenges and improve our understanding of exposure to new workplace technologies.

Based on a sample of nearly 5000 UK employees, it has, for the first time, explored how exposure to AI software, digital ICTs, wearables and robotics correlate with the most widely accepted, multidimensional measure of health-related quality of life: EuroQol EQ-5D-3L. 

This briefing focuses on exposure to new technologies and quality of life. A second brief, forthcoming, will focus on the relationship between technology exposure and quality of work.