(in German)

Many employees will know the feeling: there are only supposed to be eight hours in the working day, but you have a long list of things to do and your email inbox is overflowing. You have meetings to go to and deadlines to hit. Clients need to be kept happy, emails are waiting to be answered, standards have to be maintained. There simply isn’t enough time to do everything properly, and the minutes keep racing past. Maybe one of your colleagues is off ill or on holiday as well. The upshot is that you end up staying late in the office and working through your rest breaks, ticking off tasks as quickly as possible, and juggling several activities all at the same time.

This situation is exactly the kind of thing people go through when they suffer time pressure, pressure to perform, and information overload, three stress factors commonly encountered in the modern world of work. Heavy deadline pressure or pressure to perform was reported by 48% of the employees surveyed for the latest Stress Report from the Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (Bundesanstalt für Arbeitsschutz und Arbeitsmedizin, BAuA). The majority of workers who frequently experience heavy deadline pressure or pressure to perform feel stressed as a result. According to the BAuA Working Time Survey, employees are now relying more and more on information and communication technologies such as the Internet and email at work. For more than 50% of respondents, the use of digital media means having to manage huge volumes of frequently unwieldy information. This is often referred to as “information overload”.

In view of the changes taking place in the world of work, characterised as they are by, among other things, intensifying digitalisation and globalisation, it may be assumed time pressure, pressure to perform, and information overload will have enduring and far-reaching impacts. Digitalisation, for example, is accelerating communication and production processes, compressing product life and innovation cycles, and making massive amounts of information accessible, as a consequence of which the world of work is becoming faster-paced and increasingly complex. Employees are confronted with sustained, high levels of time pressure, pressure to perform, and information overload.

This brochure presents essential approaches on how companies can avoid and shape information overload as well as time and performance pressure at the workplace. It is intended to support those responsible in companies in carrying out this important task by showing the possibilities and success factors of design.

Please download the complete brochure:
Dealing with Time Pressure, Pressure to Perform, and Information Overload (in German only)