What is it about?
Remote workers face two invisible pressures: the expectation to stay constantly connected (techno-invasion) and being digitally watched by employers (electronic monitoring). This study of 1,446 remote workers in India found a surprising result — when employees feel compelled to be perpetually available, they actually stop taking informal digital breaks, even though such breaks help them perform better. We call this "failure of neutralization." In contrast, employees under electronic monitoring still find ways to take brief online detours — and this quietly helps their productivity. We also found that good IT support from employers reduces the negative effects of monitoring. Overall, brief, informal internet use during work hours is not always harmful — sometimes it helps workers recharge and perform better in remote settings.
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Why is it important?
Most workplace research treats informal internet use — checking social media, watching a short video — as a productivity problem to be eliminated. This study challenges that assumption. As remote and hybrid work becomes the norm, organisations are increasingly deploying surveillance tools and expecting employees to stay constantly reachable. Our research shows these two pressures work very differently: constant connectivity expectations silently overwhelm employees to the point where they cannot even take a mental break, while digital monitoring tends to push workers toward small acts of online detachment that actually help them recover and perform. The concept of "failure of neutralization" introduced here gives researchers and managers a new lens to understand when and why coping breaks down in digital work. For organisations debating return-to-office mandates or tightening monitoring policies, this study offers timely, evidence-based caution.
Perspectives
What struck me most while conducting this research was how invisible the burden of perpetual availability has become for remote workers. We often discuss surveillance and monitoring as the central concern in digital workplaces, but our data revealed something more subtle — the internalised pressure to always be "on" can quietly erode a worker's capacity to even pause for a moment. This finding made me reconsider how organisations design remote work, not just what tools they use, but what norms they silently enforce. I hope this work encourages managers to think less about watching employees and more about giving them the psychological space to actually do their best work.
Dr. Vibhash Kumar
South Asian University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Failure of neutralization: How digital job demands shape cyberslacking and job performance in telework, Acta Psychologica, April 2026, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2026.106609.
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