Information and Communication Overload in the Workplace

Due to the novelty of social media technologies, and our experiences using them, research is only beginning to unveil how the hours dedicated to online interactions are impacting human behaviour. Enterprise social media (ESM) platforms such as Jive, Chatter, and Yammer are akin to the public Facebook but are employed for internal communication and social interaction within the enterprise.  One of the many challenges knowledge workers now face is the amount of ESM communications they are expected to deal with.  Information overload is the undesirable condition that occurs when the information to be assimilated exceeds one’s information processing capacity, leading to lost productivity and quality of life.  In our technology saturated workplaces, the information overload problem will only amplify unless we generate creative solutions.  To do so, we first need to understand the actual antecedents to the information overload predicament.

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