Some of the effects of workplace digitalisation are well studied, such as changes in workers’ wages and increased economic inequality. But how does technological progress affect workers’ health? Melanie Arntz, Sebastian Findeisen, Stephan Maurer and Oliver Schlenker explore the effects of digitalisation on two groups of employees: manual and non-manual workers. This differentiation allows them to find evidence of worsening health due to the stress of performing increasingly complex tasks.
Technological progress comes with profound transformations in the workplace. It can change wages and increase economic inequality, displace workers, change the types of jobs that workers do, and change the tasks performed within a given occupation. While these effects have been well-documented, the role of technology in shaping workers’ health has received less attention.
Technological progress can affect workers’ health in different ways. Automation through the introduction of industrial robots has been shown to decrease the repetitiveness of tasks and injury rates. However, the more recent advances in digital production technology, such as the inter-connection of industrial equipment using cloud platforms known as the Internet of Things (IoT), risk creating “technostress”, a phenomenon that Tarafdar and co-authors define as a “situation of stress experienced by the individual because of an inability to adapt to the introduction of new technology in a healthy manner”. Thus, the increasing (digital) complexity of the workplace due to modern technologies has the potential to overstrain workers and, by that, affect their health, particularly for individuals with less experience of complex tasks.
Our research
In a recent working paper, we study the health effects of digitalisation with a unique, novel dataset from Germany. The Digital Transformation of Work dataset combines administrative information about firms and employees from social security records with firm and employee surveys that collect detailed information about the adoption of digital production technologies both at the firm and the worker level. Employees were surveyed in 2019 and asked about their work environment in the present as well as in 2011. Crucially for our purposes, respondents were asked about their self-assessed health status in both years and for the number of days spent on sick leave in the year before the interview in 2019.
The richness of the survey allows us to create worker-level measures of technology adoption. It further allows us to differentiate between two different waves of technological progress: computerisation, meaning the increasing use of already mature computer-based tools, and digitalisation, which refers to the increasing use of “smart”, intelligently connected means of production (sometimes also referred to as 4.0 technologies).
We document how digitalisation affects the workplace. Workers who report an increased digitalisation of their workplace also report increased use of cutting-edge technologies such as virtual augmented reality, big data, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things and Services.
Different tasks
New tools bring about important changes in workers’ tasks. Workers affected by digitalisation report more customer contact and an increasing use of complex mathematics. They find their jobs less repetitive but more “intense” overall in the sense of facing more deadlines or performance pressure. In this, digitalisation differs from traditional, mature computerisation, which does not affect the work intensity and complexity and is mostly associated with increased use of basic and specialised software.
To estimate the effects of digitalisation on health, we relate a worker’s change in their subjective health assessment to digitalisation at their own workplace. The richness of the underlying survey further allows us to control for initial job and firm characteristics and health measured in 2011, Big Five personality traits, technological comprehension and past earnings trajectories, as well as occupation and industry trends. We thus estimate effects by comparing individuals with similar demographics, skills and personality traits who initially work in similar work environments in similar firms and report the same initial level of health but differ in the subsequent technology evolution at their workplace.
Several papers from psychology have highlighted that increasing complexity is particularly taxing on workers with previously less complex tasks. Guided by these studies, we further explore the issue with respect to the initial type of job that workers did, using a data-driven approach that groups workers into “manual” and “cognitive”. Manual workers have jobs that contain little writing, math software usage, sitting, and ICT frequency, but frequent physical exertion and machine usage. The reverse is true for cognitive workers.
This approach is very similar to commonly used approaches using task information, but it also reflects education. Thus, it allows us to test whether manual workers, who also tend to be less educated, are particularly affected by the adoption of digital technologies, which add complexity.
Our findings
We find that, overall, digitalisation has no effect on workers’ health, both for changes in self-assessed health and the number of sick days in 2018/19. But when we estimate the effects for cognitive and manual workers separately, we find that the two groups differ substantially. While cognitive workers seem unaffected in terms of health, manual workers exposed to a more rapidly digitalising workplace report lower subjective health and a higher number of sick days. These results are unchanged by accounting for broad industry or occupation trends and for the organisational structure of the firm. This indicates that it is not larger trends, but the changes at the individual workplace that are driving our effect.
Do manual workers get “compensated” for their worsened health through higher earnings or better employment prospects? The analysis of administrative social security records indicates that this is not the case, leading us to conclude that digitalisation exacerbates existing inequalities across worker groups. Our paper documents that by widening the health gap across education groups, digitalisation adds another inequality dimension to the well-documented widening of income inequality caused by automation technologies.
But our results also provide cause for some optimism: we find that the negative effects of technology on health can be attenuated when the firm provides technology training and a supportive work environment. These findings highlight firms’ decisive role in mitigating the consequences of changing workplaces in general and of technological change in particular. Nevertheless, more research is needed on how re-skilling can best prevent adverse health shocks from the use of modern technologies, especially for vulnerable workers.
- This blog post is based on CEP discussion paper 1984 ‘Are we yet sick of new technologies? The unequal health effects of digitalisation’, LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance.
- The post represents the views of the author(s), not the position of LSE Business Review or the London School of Economics and Political Science.
- Featured image provided by Shutterstock
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