When Showing more Humanity in your Work can be Dangerous

Sociability and empathy come with a price

As automation threatens our job, we might put on our most human face at work.

That means socializing with colleagues, connecting with customers, or bringing surprise and creativity to our work. And for sure, these are good ways to stand out among automated emails and customer service.

However, these behaviors also have an emotional and cognitive cost that we might not neglect. Permanent overwork, exhaustion, and loss of meaning are common risks for recognition-seeking workers.

Here’s how you can show more humanity in your job while maintaining your energy and sanity.

Sociability and Fatigue

In many ways, the connections we have with our colleagues have been steadily diminishing in recent years. Because of recurrent lockdowns, remote work, and the individualization of careers, workers have got used to communicating only through screens.

For example, an alarming report in 2010 indicated that only 30% of people had a close friend at work.

To address this problem, many companies are now adopting strategies to recreate these connections, essential to a functioning organization and a vibrant corporate culture. For example, some companies allow employees to offer social bonuses to their coworkers or organize various team-building events and social experiences.

Yet these initiatives can ultimately have hidden consequences. Investing in relationships, maintaining group discussions, and attending social events can put a burden on your mental health once they exceed your capabilities.

Introverts and extroverts alike can quickly experience fatigue from interacting with people all day long. Some studies have even related this effect to social network fatigue. We waste energy by constantly receiving social updates about others and complying with social norms.

So it might make sense to show up in all social interactions within your company, to generate value outside of carefully automated business processes. But you should also weigh the pressure that falls on your shoulders as you invest in the lives of others and come across too many informal team meetings and discussions.

Sociability should not come at the cost of disengaging from yourself and the value you bring by your work.

The Dangers of Empathy

As automation is getting widespread, the ability to connect emotionally with others remains a distinctly human quality. Understanding the need and the suffering of the other, adopting reassuring behaviors, and gaining someone’s trust are still highly valuable skills.

Some professions, especially those related to human contact, still hold a bright future. However, being a psychologist, nurse, or emergency doctor also implies responsibilities with unbearable psychological pressure.

What psychologists call compassion fatigue results from being constantly exposed to the suffering of clients or patients. By constantly identifying with the misfortunes of individuals in distress, social or medical workers experience a generalized apathy. This condition can lead them to a loss of meaning in their work and depressive tendencies.

For this reason, workers in difficult human environments are often specifically trained to take care of themselves. But these risks can also apply to jobs not directly related to human suffering.

A lawyer dealing with traumatic client cases, a customer service agent continuously dealing with client distress, or journalists personally defending oppressed groups might also face intense emotional fatigue.

To prevent that, occupational psychologists suggest refocusing your attention on the positive results of your actions. You might easily overthink the distress of the people who need your help, which can lead to risky behavior. To avoid these risks, you need to find time to care for yourself, learn to mentally anticipate difficult situations, and reconsider the personal implications of your work.

Empathy is a quintessential human capacity, beyond the reach of machines, but it can also be a double-edged sword. Don’t forget the restorative power of self-care.

Confronting Variability

Regardless of the profession, routine tasks involving a preset list of actions are commonplace. As machines thrive on repetitive computation, they are also the most at risk of automation.

This is not the case for jobs that require workers to multitask and improvise. By relying on cross-functional thinking and creative abilities, people in these professions gain a head start on automation.

On top of that, task variability is one of the best indicators of work engagement. Switching from one task to another increases participants’ creative performance, allowing the brain to proceed with more relaxed thinking. On the other hand, relying on genuine interactions instead of predetermined scripts improves the satisfaction of customer service workers.

However, as fulfilling as they can be, these high-variability jobs can also be cognitively exhausting and inefficient. Especially when they look like scattered responsibilities, these jobs can saturate our judgment, and lead to a loss of meaning. For example, psychologist Arthur Jersild has shown how people find it more difficult to alternate between adding and subtracting than to perform the same operation consecutively.

In a more professional setting, systems and organization researcher Diwas KC has studied the impact of multitasking in a profession as vital as emergency doctors. The more patients the doctor has to deal with in a single day, the more frequent the errors in diagnosis and treatment. This results in patients coming back to the service and overloading the departments.

The answer to this issue? Strike a balance between challenging variability and cognitive dispersion. This will stimulate your creativity in your tasks while avoiding the risk of burn-out in the long run.

Work and Personal Identity

As workers are increasingly attaching their sense of belonging to their work, employee engagement has never been higher.

New generations seek to contribute through their work to values personally meaningful to them. And these deeper beliefs provide companies with more passionate, creative, and therefore more human employees.

However, this sense of duty can lead to over-commitment and an excessive preference for activity, and thus a psychological inability to rest from work off the clock. Researchers Hsee and colleagues have shown that workers in a challenging environment prefer to work more to earn more, without even resting when they have earned enough. Furthermore, they systematically enjoy rewards after an effort and rarely before, preventing themselves from resting for their benefit.

Companies are partly responsible for these behaviors, by providing incentives to work more and earn more. And even when they try to offer time off, workers don’t use these benefits because of a culture valuing attendance rather than results.

Yet, they have everything to gain by encouraging their employees to rest. The experiment conducted by the New Zealand company Perpetual Guardian proves it: working less improves employee satisfaction and productivity. And makes them more human!

So now you know why showing your most human side can also lead you to harm yourself. Perhaps the best humanity is found in sobriety and working less rather than in obsession and overwork. For sure, a machine won’t claim a well-deserved rest!