It is pretty obvious in recent times that all of us are engaged online more than we ever have before. Be it online shopping, online skill enhancement, remote teaching, Webinars, Chat rooms, online gaming and even online banking.
The lockdown did force us all to remain indoors but as life moved on, we all adapted soon and started to continue the usual mundane life with a slight change of replacing all outdoor tasks to be done simply by going online and sitting down at your sofa in your comfortable house.
It seems to be more like a blessing and less like a misfortune for sure. But when observed closely, a complete different truth reveals itself. Let’s take the education industry for instance, all the schools readily adapted to the E-Learning set up to keep up with the current turn of events.
In fact I must mention that Saraswati Global School became one of the pioneers in Faridabad to adopt and successfully run the E-Learning tools in the school for taking regular classes for its students.
Now remote teaching is a task in itself, a teacher is not physically present among the kids and they still have to somehow make him/her available for all at once, captivate the kids attention and meanwhile have to deal with the technical difficulties as well.
For a teacher who is working from her home, taking classes regularly roughly does the following activities all at once:
- Preparing for class.
- Scheduling a class.
- Responding to all work mails.
- Responding to all private queries of parents and students.
- Responding to personal notifications on Facebook Messenger, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram, old-fashioned text messages and personal calls.
Thus we see Communication floods in from all angles. So when people work from home they multitask online, particularly when accessing social media, emails and video, not to mention doing this alongside real-world events. For example, background television noise, conversations in the room and the dog barking; all of this “exceeds and exhausts users’ working memory capacities and, consequently, their situational coping capacities.” This became the oncoming of the new term called DIGITAL STRESS. Many researches and reports confirm that specific usage patterns such as digital multitasking and constant connectedness will have a big cost for users’ cognitive capacity. Having an “online vigilance” has an additional source of digital stress.
We at Saraswati Global School ensure that our staff understand their time distribution between work and personal obligations and maintain a perfect balance for maintaining an efficient and healthy work environment. We have started transitioning slowly back to physical classes which will help to rely a little less on online communication and give our teachers a chance to get exclusive time for their household and social obligations as well.
This must be open for discussion on all other sectors too and suitable steps must be taken to at least address the problems related to this work hazard.
Article by
Minakshi Sharma
Principal – Saraswati Global School Faridabad
Pradeep Kumar