Technostress: wellbeing at work starts with the tools

Customer experience gets the budget. The website loads fast, the checkout has as few steps as possible, quotes go out the same day. Then everyone goes back to their own desk, opens the internal management system, and waits.

The gap is so common that it passes for normal. Outward-facing, every detail is looked after. Inside, people put up with tools nobody would dare show a customer.

If you employ people in Italy, including from a company headquartered elsewhere, part of what follows is not good practice but law: Italian rules on work at display screen equipment cover the screen, the desk and, less known, the software. The rest is what we see every day from the supplier’s side of the desk. Research has a name for the strain that inadequate tools produce, technostress, and it is the thread running through this article.

Why it happens, and it is almost always the same reason

It is not carelessness and it is not meanness. It is that customer experience gets measured and the employee’s does not.

We know everything about the website: how many visitors arrive, how many leave, where they stall. If a page slows down, the dip shows up on a chart and someone fixes it within the week. About the internal system we know nothing. Nobody times the twenty minutes a day that a badly designed procedure can cost, nobody adds up how often the same data is typed in twice.

So whoever chooses the internal tools ends up optimising the one thing that will actually be looked at later, which is the price. Lost time appears in no report, so for practical purposes it does not exist.

There is a second reason, and it is less comfortable: an unhappy customer leaves, an unhappy employee stays. The urgency to fix things grows where someone can walk away, and for years that works. Then one day the employee walks away too, and by then the bill is a great deal higher than a monitor.

Wellbeing is not a treatment, it is a condition

When companies talk about wellbeing they usually mean events: the initiative, the dedicated day, the added perk. Good things, but they start and they end.

The working day does not. It is made of gestures that repeat: how long the computer takes to start, whether the screen tires the eyes by mid-afternoon, how many times the same information gets rewritten, how long the wait is when something breaks.

Wellbeing at work does not begin with perks. It begins with the tools people hold in their hands every day.

The signal that says it all: the parallel file

There is a way to notice without measuring anything, and it is to look at where people have built themselves a shortcut. The file on the desktop, the personal spreadsheet, the chat thread that has replaced the management system.

Nobody works around a system that works. When a parallel file appears it is not a discipline problem, it is information about the tool: someone has worked out that doing it themselves costs less effort than using what the company bought.

And it does not stay a private nuisance. That data lives outside company systems, it is not in the backups, it follows no access rules, and the day that person changes job it leaves with them. At that point it is a data problem and a security problem.

Sometimes the tool is fine, and everything else is missing

There is one mistake to avoid here, and it is the most expensive one: assuming that a parallel file always means the wrong software. Very often the program does exactly what is needed, and nobody ever explained how to use it.

It happens at three moments, and none of the three is anyone’s responsibility.

On arrival. The new hire gets a login and learns by watching the colleague at the next desk. Who learned the same way. Three generations on, the company works in a manner nobody decided and nobody can justify any more, with the mistakes inherited along with the habits.

When the software changes. Management systems get updated, often precisely in the parts that wasted time. But if nobody says so, people keep taking the long way round for years, convinced the short one does not exist. It is the quietest form of waste there is: a feature paid for and never used.

When the work changes. Procedures evolve, the tool stays the same, and the way it is used is never revisited.

It is the same asymmetry as at the start: the customer gets the product explained, gets the demo, gets the guide. The employee gets a login and good luck.

It is worth rereading, with this in mind, the wording of the regulation set out further down: the software must be easy to use relative to the knowledge and experience of the person using it. Ease of use is not an absolute property of a program, it is a relationship between the program and the person. And that relationship can be worked on from both ends.

The practical conclusion runs against our own commercial interest, but it is true: before replacing a system, check whether anyone ever explained it. Swapping out a tool nobody learned to use moves the problem and costs far more.

Two things Italian law says that almost nobody knows

In Italy the existence of rules on work at display screen equipment, what the law calls the videoterminale, is common knowledge. What is actually in them is not, and two passages surprise almost everyone.

The first concerns software. Annex XXXIV of Legislative Decree 81 of 2008, Italy’s consolidated health and safety at work act, is not only about objects: it requires that when software is designed, chosen or purchased, the employer takes into account that it is suited to the task, easy to use relative to the knowledge and experience of the person using it, and built so as to give workers understandable guidance on carrying out the work correctly.

Read the start of that again: the law ties those criteria to the moment of purchase. The usability of a management system is not an office preference, it is a factor that enters into the decision to buy it.

The second concerns the workstation. The same annex says where the screen goes: top edge slightly below the horizontal line through the operator’s eyes, at roughly 50 to 70 centimetres from them, freely tilting and swivelling, free of reflections. Complying, in most cases, requires buying nothing at all.

The rest, meaning the threshold of twenty hours a week that defines a display screen worker and the intervals between medical checks, is in the consolidated text linked in the sources below. We do not work it out for anyone here: where a company’s position depends on the detail, the check belongs to the employer together with the company doctor, the physician appointed for health surveillance, whom Italian law calls the medico competente.

One last point, and it holds the whole argument together: Article 28 of the same decree states that the risk assessment, including in the choice of work equipment, covers the risks linked to work-related stress. Choosing the tools and assessing stress are not separate chapters.

How long the wait is when something breaks

There is a part that gets mentioned less and felt more. Being stuck for days over a problem that blocks the work is not a technical inconvenience: the person who cannot work has to explain to colleagues why they are idle, chase what piles up, start again from scratch each time.

Research has given a name to the strain that comes from IT tools, technostress, and among the dimensions it identifies are precisely the usability of the tools and the technical support behind them. A 2023 study of 167 employees at a German university hospital found technology and information overload associated with burnout symptoms even after accounting for overall workload. It is a cross-sectional study on a small sample, so it points to an association rather than a cause, but the direction is one anybody who works in an office will recognise.

It is also why response times belong in writing rather than in a verbal understanding. The difference between “I have logged a ticket” and “it is already fixed” is not a contractual nuance: it is somebody’s day. And it is what you are buying when you hand the day-to-day running of your systems to an external provider, that is, with IT outsourcing.

The number that closes the circle

The 2024 edition of ESENER, the European Survey of Enterprises on New and Emerging Risks run by the EU agency for safety and health at work, covered more than 41,000 establishments in 30 countries. It says two things that need reading together.

Workplaces acknowledge that digital technologies bring greater work intensity in 34% of cases, information overload in 32%, and a blurred line between work and private life in 27%.

Yet only 43% include them in their risk assessment.

It is the asymmetry from the opening, measured: we know digital tools affect people, and more than half of organisations leave them out when they assess what can harm the people who work there.

Where to start

You do not need a three-year plan and you do not need to replace everything. You need three questions, and you can ask them this week.

• Where is time lost every day, always at the same point?
• Which steps get bypassed, and with which parallel file?
• How long is the actual wait when something stops, measured over the past month rather than read off the contract?

They cost nothing, and each one points to a precise spot where the company is already paying for something without noticing.

After that the decisions get simple. If the sticking point is the age of the machines, what we wrote about what to do with your PC fleet when support ends applies: you rarely replace everything at once, you almost always need a criterion. When periodic replacement weighs on cash flow, operational leasing turns it into a steady line instead of an outlay every three years.

If the sticking point is that nobody answers when something breaks, buying another computer achieves nothing: it is a question of cover and response times, in other words of IT outsourcing.

And if the sticking point is the price difference between two products that on paper do the same job, it usually comes down to the right lines on the spec sheet: an adjustment that exists rather than not, a matte panel instead of a glossy one, a warranty with on-site service instead of shipping the unit away for repair. They are lines at the bottom of a datasheet that are felt every day for the whole working life of the machine.

Get in touch and we will look at workstations, tools and response times together: we will tell you where it pays to act first, and what can wait.

Frequently asked questions

When does Italian law treat someone as a display screen worker?

It depends on actual use of the equipment, not on the job title. Article 173 of Legislative Decree 81 of 2008 sets the threshold at twenty hours a week, net of the breaks provided for in Article 175. The count is made case by case and belongs to the employer with the support of the company doctor.

Does the Italian display screen regulation say anything about software?

Yes. Annex XXXIV requires that, when choosing and purchasing software, the employer takes several factors into account: that it is suited to the task, easy to use relative to the knowledge and experience of the person using it, and that it gives understandable guidance on carrying out the work correctly. It also states that no quantitative or qualitative monitoring device may be used without the workers’ knowledge.

What does Italian law require of a workstation screen?

Annex XXXIV calls for a stable, flicker-free image, brightness and contrast easily adjustable by the user, a screen that tilts and swivels freely and is free of reflections and glare. It also specifies placement: top edge slightly below eye level and a distance from the eyes of roughly 50 to 70 centimetres.

Is technostress recognised in Italian law?

Not under that name: technostress is a research term. The category that counts in Italy is work-related stress, and Article 28 of Legislative Decree 81 of 2008 requires the risk assessment, including in the choice of work equipment, to expressly cover the risks linked to work-related stress.

How often must display screen workers have a medical check in Italy?

Article 176 sets a two-year interval for workers judged fit with prescriptions or limitations and for those aged fifty or over, and a five-year interval in all other cases. The actual scheduling and the fitness judgement rest with the company doctor.