A new way to measure digital wellbeing, and a warning about measuring it alone
- Josephine Tan
How much time employees spend on their devices has become a familiar proxy for digital wellbeing. New research from the University of Nottingham suggests it may be the wrong one.
Researchers from the university’s School of Psychology and Medicine have developed and validated the Digital Mindfulness Scale, the first measure designed to capture how mindfully people engage with technology at work and how that engagement protects their wellbeing. Published in Computers in Human Behaviour, the study tracked around 400 employees in the UK across two surveys a month apart. Those who scored higher in digital mindfulness went on to report lower technostress and exhaustion, and better mental wellbeing, a month later – over and above their general disposition to mindfulness and other related factors.
The 15-item scale measures three dimensions: intention, meaning a clear purpose for using technology; attention, or staying focused and resisting digital distraction; and attitude, which covers responding to oneself with kindness and patience when things go wrong. That third dimension is an unusual inclusion in a workplace measure, and it reflects the study’s grounding in establishing mindfulness principles adapted for digitally mediated work.
“As more and more of our working lives are mediated by digital technology, what matters is not just how much we use it, but how we engage with it,” says Elizabeth Marsh, PhD researcher at the School of Psychology and lead author. “Digital mindfulness – engaging with our devices and applications in a deliberate, attentive and non-reactive way – appears to be a genuinely protective resource for wellbeing in the modern workplace.”
For HR leaders, the appeal of a validated measure is obvious. It offers a way to assess a workforce, evaluate a wellbeing initiative, and demonstrate that something is being done. Marsh is unusually direct about where that logic breaks down.
“A resource changes how people cope with demands. It doesn’t touch the demand itself,” she tells HRM Asia. In her earlier work, the volume, pace and always-on nature of digital work functions as a job demand – a feature of how work is designed rather than a personal habit.
Asked what would happen if an organisation measured digital mindfulness, found low scores and responded with training while leaving workload and availability expectations unchanged, she was blunt. “I’d expect modest gains at best, and ones that potentially fade. Teaching people to attend more carefully while the flow of messages, meetings, tools and after-hours expectations continues unchanged avoids addressing the job demands at the source.”
She named the criticism herself. “This is the ‘McMindfulness’ criticism made of workplace mindfulness programmes generally, and it is a fair one when mindfulness is deployed this way.”
The second cost, she argues, is harder to reverse. “Measuring digital mindfulness, finding low scores and responding only with training puts the problem inside the employee. People notice when the fix is aimed at them and their attention span rather than at the digital workplace ecosystem itself, or their workload, and this is how cynicism about wellbeing initiatives can start.”
What she would want instead is scores read alongside the demands people actually face, with training paired with real changes to those demands – reducing digital friction, curbing application proliferation, and addressing information and communication overload – so that the sources of pressure are tackled while individual capability is supported.
That balance is echoed by her co-authors, Professor Elvira Perez Vallejos, Professor of Digital Technology for Mental Health at the School of Medicine, who noted that supporting employees to engage mindfully with technology could be a valuable addition to workplace wellbeing strategies, particularly in environments defined by constant connectivity and interruption – but that this should complement, not replace, organisational responsibility for healthy digital work.
For organisations in Asia, there is a further question. The scale was developed and validated with employees in the UK, and Marsh is cautious about how far it generalises. Asked whether the attention dimension would behave the same way in workplaces where replying after hours is read as deference to hierarchy rather than a personal habit, she acknowledges the gap directly.
“We don’t know yet,” she says. “If replying after hours signals respect for hierarchy, then disengaging may not be a choice people feel able to make, and items about attention could be read quite differently.”
Demand for a regional version already exists. Marsh says the team has received a number of requests to translate the scale from researchers based in Asia. Before organisations here rely on it, she would want careful translation and cognitive interviews to check how people interpret the items, alongside measurement invariance testing across countries to establish whether the scale measures the same thing in the same way, with results checked against local outcomes such as exhaustion. Until then, she says, scores should be treated as indicative rather than comparable with UK results.
The next question is whether the construct survives what is coming. The scale was developed around communication and collaboration tools, not AI assistants and agents that absorb work and hand back output requiring review.
“As more critical evaluation of AI-generated information is required and more oversight of work that is delegated to agents, the attentional side of digital mindfulness may matter even more,” Marsh concludes. “That is the hypothesis for now.”
