Mental Workload: What It Is, How To Study It And How To Manage It
As ergonomics becomes more important in the workplace, aspects such as the demands and mental fatigue to which workers may be subjected become issues that must be taken into account to ensure not only good performance, but also to prevent mistakes are made.
The idea of mental workload It refers to how cognitively demanding a task is depending on how difficult it is and the capabilities that the worker himself has.
This idea is very important when managing work in an organization and below we are going to go into more detail about why.
In any job it is necessary to put mechanisms or processes into operation, both physical and mental, to carry out the tasks required. These mechanisms involve what has been called “workload”, which can well be defined as the set of psychophysical requirements to which an employee is subjected throughout the working day, having more or less impact on their performance and health
There are few purely “intellectual” or purely “physical” jobs, since regardless of the sector in which you work, you will always have to do tasks that require different skills, and they can be of both types.
However, from a theoretical point of view we can differentiate between physical and mental work depending on the activity that predominates and, based on this, we can talk about two types of workloads: physical, when required muscle to work, and the mental, when thinking and reflecting are required.
Taking all this into account, we can say that mental workload is the set of mental, cognitive or intellectual requirements to which a worker is subjected throughout his or her working day. This is becoming increasingly important because New forms of work organization, together with technological and computer advances, facilitate manual work while requiring greater intellectual work compared to more traditional jobs.
Both the mental and physical load depend on the interaction or relationship established between two factors.
This means that The individual’s response capacity varies according to the demands of the work that he or she is responsible for carrying out in addition to his or her own individual characteristics When the demands of the job do not adapt to the capabilities of the worker, that is, the individual has a certain inability or difficulty in performing the work he or she is supposed to perform, we speak of inadequate workload.
Consequences of mental load
Mental workload represents the mental tension to which a worker is subject in a specific period of time and when faced with a specific task.
This condition It is not intrinsically good or bad, but depends on how it occurs, its duration over time and degree of exhaustion and to what extent the person presenting it feels that they are capable of doing the intellectual tasks requested of them. Based on this, we can comment on two types of consequences of mental load.
1. Facilitating effects
In a generic way, we can define facilitating effects as those positive consequences of having a certain mental workload.
Among the facilitating effects we can find the warming effect, a phenomenon that implies that the worker requires a lower amount of effort That is, it is the phenomenon by which, thanks to a certain mental tension, we perform more fluidly in the intellectually demanding task.
2. Harmful effects
Being subjected to cognitively demanding tasks for a long time or that are more difficult than what we are used to can bring detrimental effects, the main one being mental fatigue.
We can define this as a temporary reduction in mental and physical efficiency dependent on the intensity, duration and temporal distribution of mental stress to which the worker is subject Fatigue causes irritability, more mistakes, accidents and worse decision making.
Depending on how long the worker has been fatigued, we can talk about two types of fatigue: physiological or normal and chronic. Physiological would be the normal tiredness that we feel when we have done a cognitively demanding activity, a loss of normal homeostasis and that to recover it it will be enough to take a break. However, if the individual is subjected to fatigue for a long time, without being able to rest adequately, this state will become chronic, causing psychological damage.
Assessment
The expression “mental workload” refers to a non-unitary or unidimensional concept, which means its evaluation is not a uniform procedure There is no single ideal and perfect way to evaluate this type of phenomenon associated with work.
Fortunately, there are several ways to evaluate and measure it depending on the purpose of what you want to observe, evaluating different aspects of mental work using different measurement techniques and with different degrees of precision.
Between techniques and instruments to evaluate mental workload we have the following.
1. Physiological measurements
Physiological measurements record the physiological changes produced in the worker’s body that are related to the demands of the task they have to perform. Among these measures We can talk about brain electrical activity, blink rate, puular diameter or heart rate, among others
2. Subjective techniques
Subjective techniques reflect the worker’s own perceived level of mental workload. Among these measurements we can find the NASA-TLX, SWAT or the Cooper-Harper scale.
It would consist of all those tools that evaluate the mental and psychomotor performance of the employee under certain working conditions for example to determine the variations in worker performance attributable to the effects of mental workload.
4. Analysis of work and task
Job analysis involves evaluating the sources of mental workload such as the elements of the task, physical working conditions, environmental conditions…
Prevention
As we have mentioned, mental load in itself is neither good nor bad, but depends on its amount. For example, In many cases, a certain level of mental load is necessary to motivate the worker and prevent him from getting bored since a job that is too simple can be seen as too monotonous and consequently get fed up with it, or undervalue it and make mistakes.
On the other hand, if the job is too complicated you may eventually get tired and have an accident because you did not pay enough attention.
It is for all this that, for avoid the harmful consequences of mental workload caused by having either given workers too complicated tasks or because not enough attention has been paid to how fatigued they were, the following points must be followed:
