An article from Business Times.
Three Reasons Why We Are All So Stressed At WorkIf your screen freezes, try ignoring it. As that report you've spent a week working on gets chewed up by the hard drive, shrug and forget about it.
Whatever happens, don't call the exhausted souls in the information-technology department. They are too stressed out already. The last thing they need is you shouting at them.
According to a survey released last month by Dublin-based consulting firmSkillSoft,
97 per cent of IT professionals feel traumatised by their daily work. Indeed, 80 per cent of them get tense just thinking about going to the office. Poor them. (precisely what I felt 1.5 yrs ago)
Whether IT is really the most stressful occupation on the planet is something we could all have an interesting, if nervous, conversation about. What appears beyond doubt is that workplace stress has turned into an epidemic.
Why is that? After all, as the world becomes wealthier, and as billions get invested in new technology, you might imagine our working lives would get easier, not harder.
In reality, work has become so psychologically demanding because we choose to make it that way.
No one would deny that stress is everywhere. SkillSoft talked to 3,000people to come up with its conclusion that handling the computer frazzles the nerves more than any other job. "In most of the organizations we workwith, there is contant streamlining, there is multi-tasking, people are being asked to do more and more things." Kevin Young, managing director ofSkillSoft, said in a telephone interview. "That is true right across different industries. The speed of change just gets faster.
Actually, the title of the most emotionally traumatised profession is hotly disputed, even among some fairly unlikely candidates. In the SoftSkillsurvey, the IT jocks came out top of the pile. They were followed by medicine and engineering. Yet according to a paper presented to the British Psychological Society earlier this year, librarians suffer more from stress than any other occupation.
It is hard not to sympathise with all of them. IT workers have to wrestle with technology that never seems to get more reliable, or user-friendly. If our cars are as wonky as our computer, we'd all keep a spare horse in the garden just in case. Librarians have to deal with people who don't bring their books back on time, or maybe fold down the edges of the pages.
The ranking may well be meaningless. Everyone is under pressure at work. The interesting question is why jobs become more stressful all the time. There are three reasons. First, hyperactivity is a badge of honor. In the modern office, there is little place for the person who outs his feet up onthe desk, pushes back the chair and stares at the passing clouds for a few minutes.
If you aren't rushing around like a hamster on steroids, the boss thinks you are lazy. You will be downsized before you've had a chance to say manana. Stress has been built into the DNA of office life. It's a wayof proving that we are committed to our organization. If we aren't hyped up and chewing our fingernails, we aren't working
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Lastly, we have forgotten how to be polite and considerate when dealing with our co-workers, suppliers or customers. (i've seen a fair share of this) In the SoftSkill survey, IT workers cited bullying behaviour by managers and collegues as among the reasons they felt so stressed.
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Globalization, competition and the pace of change may all have played arole. Yet work is so stressful because we've choosen to make it thay way.Maybe its time we all just relaxed a bit. And perhaps even stopped shoutingat the IT department.
Bonkers @ 6/02/2006 10:50:00 PM
