Burnt out teams: employee frustration with tech and AI! Blog Series by L Jackman

Over two trillion dollars was spent on tech and digital transformation tools globally in 2024. The sales pitch? Simplified tasks, one app that does all, time savings, smoother collaborations, better teamwork.

Part two of the resentment series focuses on the question; do digital tools and

employees truly work in sync or have the big promises of workplace tech unraveled?

Technology and digital tools are the silent coworkers businesses and companies are using to

increase productivity, profits, reduce product development costs, produce higher quality work and faster outputs. While this represents one perspective it ignores the parallel uptick which presents itself in the form of employee resentment.

Employees notice when a company invests millions in technology but seem to care less about the frontline needs of staff e.g. the broken chair that never gets fixed. They grow resentful towards the technology and digital tools which fuel the nonstop demands on their time and are constantly changing workflow and environments at a breakneck speed. This is coupled with an unattainable assumption that employees learning and adapting will match that pace. Productivity is becoming synonymous with spending hours trying to understand or navigate a complicated digital system to get what is needed.

Productivity also means an increase in being monitored. Companies have invested in employee monitoring systems like keystroke logging, GPS tracking or performance dashboards on laptops, phones etc. Technology has been applied to help scale micromanagement, applying pressure across the company by providing metrics without context. This can erode trust fueling feelings of resentment and a culture of compliance, fear and burnout. Resentment towards being monitored. Resentment towards receiving emails on vacation, expectations of being in Teams or Zoom meetings on days off or to respond to WhatsApp/Telegram messages during family time. All accompanied by the anticipation of an immediate response.

Before the Covid19 Pandemic employees were using an average of around nine or ten digital tools. After the pandemic that number increased to over twenty- five and is predicted to continue growing. How much time is spent learning these systems?

Where does this learning time come from? If deadlines must be met and productivity maintained, then it stands to reason that the employee is borrowing from their rest and personal time. Companies continue to lay off staff as a go-to solution even though the problems may be structural or cultural, raising questions about priorities. An irony is the digital tools used to replace staff and accelerate output also accelerate resentment and burnout. An even bigger irony is tech companies put the best tools at the top of the pricing pyramid with pricey updates and a carnival of tools that promise a bigger show.

What actually happens becomes the fodder for the resentment culture that is found in the “left behinds.” You know the left behinds, the ones who were “spared” from the layoffs but got saddled with the work of three people and a new co-worker called CRM. CRM which should really stand for Can’t Really Manage or Constantly Requires Me or Corporate Resourced Micromanagement or Chronic Repetitive Misery. All jokes aside, whether it is analytical, operational or collaborative CRMs, these systems can offer benefits but there are still pain points in the integration and interaction between them and employees.

CRMs and ERPs (Enterprise Resource Planning) cannot properly capture the intangibles of company culture such as trust, integrity, leadership styles, favouritism, nepotism, collaborative behaviours etc. An employee has wisdom that cannot be replaced by a system.

Companies may provide training on using the systems, but this may just be viewed as another actionable item added to a worker’s already long to do list. Or the training provided is general and does not teach the users how to use tools in the context of their specific roles.

Companies often roll out new tools without consultation or buy in from the staff tasked to use them. When this happens, employees may ignore the software or default to old habits with trust in future tools deteriorating. The software may easily be integrated into one department but cause headaches for another. The subscription model often locks companies into using a product that may be misaligned with parts of the business. Two results tend to follow; a bloated tech budget and fragmented integration. Redundant subscriptions, outdated platforms, and unchecked licenses inflate the tech budget without delivering a clear ROI.

A fragmented approach may result in hurried or ad hoc tech stacking with employees having to navigate multiple or complicated tools generating a wider workflow. A tech stack typically includes frontend tools like websites and mobile apps, backend systems such as databases and APIs, and core platforms for operations (like ERP and CRM systems), communication (Slack, Teams, Zoom), marketing (Mailchimp, Google Analytics), sales (HubSpot, Pipedrive), HR (BambooHR), and finance (QuickBooks, Xero).

When done properly it is a bonus that benefits all but when done wrong produces inefficiencies, confusion and mounting frustration. Decision fatigue, reduced adoption, wasted software licenses, unnoticed critical updates and missed communications are the byproducts of tech stacking. Another major issue is lack of integration.

When systems don’t "talk" to each other, staff are forced to manually copy and paste information between platforms, leading to errors and disjointed workflows. At the end of the day, a cluttered tech stack kills productivity. Resentment builds in staff, leaders operate without clarity and clients notice the cracks. Cluttered tech stacks mirror the digital clutter you experience daily in your personal communications. People’s professional work and personal lives are colliding, conceiving digital fatigue.

In my book From Stress To Serenity: Cultivating Well-Being Through Career

Transitions, I issued an experiment to the readers. Open your phones and count how many

WhatsApp/Telegram groups you are a part of. How many are work related? How many messages does each chat get daily? I issue the same challenge to you with an added dimension. Take a quick look, no more than 3 minutes. How digital tools and apps are you using for work? How many messages and notifications do you get daily? All of which you have access to on multiple devices.

Managing all of this requires time management skills, emotional regulation and a whole lot of patience with yourself and the people you must deal with. Soft skills are the foundation on which successful technology adoption and integration is built. Systems like ERP and CRM are built with technical knowledge but live or die by how people collaborate and

communicate. A strong reminder that human behaviour is still at the core of every system.

Digital tools might be built on code, but their real test is how people interact with them. And if you've ever watched someone respond to a dashboard alert or a system notification, you’ve seen it; Pavlov’s Dog, upgraded for the digital workplace with the ding, buzz or beep of notifications causing the salivating and renamed productivity. The impulse to respond kicks in overriding better judgement with people checking messages even when driving, at a funeral or 30,000ft in the air. You recognize it is a bad habit, get angry at yourself for doing it but find it hard to resist the impulse.

Cue in resentment. Feelings of resentment are hard to accept but with career

coaching you examine these feelings, clear the mental noise and get to the root of where the energy drains are. Now you can become unstuck and move forward in your career in a

meaningful, purposeful way.