[Fatigue and mental workload among workers: about social distancing.]

Abstract

Background: Covid-19 is a latent threat; a sector of the population with a labor obligation carries out its work not in person in an unplanned context due to the extraordinary social distancing expressed in remote work, without previous experience in many cases and with health exposure due to psychosocial risk factors conditioning stress. Our objective was to describe the fatigue and mental burden in teleworkers through a bibliographic review, of interest for occupational health, public health, clinical research, psychology and other areas of knowledge. We also intend to inform the community about these issues to promote safe telework and ensure a balanced quality of life.

Methods: Structured information on the topics of fatigue and mental load was presented, based on the analysis of international literature, mainly from recent years, obtained from the search engine reviews of scientific publications Ebsco, PubMed, and supplemented with Google Scholar, according to recognized thesauri, in English and Spanish.

Results: There are also psychosocial risks in teleworking; work-related stress can be linked to fatigue, which should also be addressed as a psychosocial risk. Fatigue, although multi-causal, can be occupational in origin and may be conditioned by various aspects of labour, such as the mental workload, which is pernicious at its extremes.

Conclusions: We conclude that both fatigue and mental workload must be watched, their extremes threaten the quality of work life.