Between Flexibility and Overload: Working Students in the Digital Age

Topic

This master’s thesis examines how working students experience the expectation of constant digital availability in their professional, academic, and personal lives. Digital communication tools such as email, Teams, WhatsApp, and learning platforms create flexibility but can also lead to pressure, interruptions, blurred boundaries, and digital overload. The focus is on identifying the coping strategies working students use to manage these tensions and protect their well-being.

Relevance

In Switzerland, a growing number of students are employed alongside their studies, exposing them to overlapping digital demands from both worlds. Constant availability can increase stress, reduce concentration, and make recovery more difficult. Understanding these challenges helps working students, employers, and higher education institutions establish healthier communication norms, reduce digital pressure, and promote more sustainable ways of working and learning.

Results

The results show that expectations regarding digital availability were often implicit and frequently self-imposed. Participants felt pressure to respond quickly, especially in professional contexts, and described blurred boundaries between work, study, and personal life. Digital communication contributed to technostress, interruptions, and reduced rest, but also enabled flexibility, productivity, and faster coordination. The theoretical model illustrates how digital availability can lead to either techno-distress or techno-eustress depending on context and coping strategies. Participants used boundary strategies such as managing notifications, delaying responses, setting time limits, separating devices, and consciously disconnecting.

Implications for practitioners

• Working students should set personal boundaries by establishing response times, limiting notifications, protecting recovery time, and using separate devices, accounts, or communication channels to separate work, studies, and personal life.
• Working students should prioritize urgent messages, define clear urgency signals with close contacts or study groups, and intentionally delay responses to non-urgent notifications to reduce the constant pressure to reply.
• Employers and higher education institutions should establish clear and realistic expectations regarding response times so that students and employees know when an immediate response is required.
• Employers and higher education institutions should reduce the implicit pressure to be constantly available by explicitly establishing communication standards, particularly outside of work or study hours.

Methods

This study used an exploratory qualitative research design. Data were collected through 12 semi-structured interviews with working students who regularly use digital communication tools in academic and professional contexts. The interviews were conducted in German via Microsoft Teams, transcribed, translated into English, and analyzed using thematic analysis based on the NCT model. The coding process was supported by Taguette, and the data structure was organized according to the Gioia methodology, progressing from first-order concepts to second-order themes and aggregate dimensions. The analysis focused on digital availability expectations, technostress, boundary blurring, coping strategies, digital communication benefits, and institutional support.