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Date: Thursday, August 23, 2007

Is E-mail sending workers over the edge?

E-mail is seen as the ultimate invention of the twentieth century, making communication easier and more effective, but now workers have said that the pressure to keep checking their emails causes stress and impacts on their work.

In a recent survey and tracking experiment, many workers were found to check their e-mails upwards of forty times an hour. Workers are saying that the pressure to always keep on top of their e-mails causes them extreme stress and makes them break off in the middle of doing another task, meaning their work is disjointed. The onslaught of emails that one worker receives in a day is proving too much for employees to handle, leading to the newly-dubbed ‘e-mail stress’ amongst office staff. Research undertaken by Glasgow and Paisley universities found that over a third of those questioned believed they checked their inbox every 15 minutes and 64% of respondents said they checked their e-mails more than once an hour. However when researchers fitted monitors to their computers, workers were found to be viewing e-mails up to 40 times an hour. Of those questioned 33% said they felt stressed by the amount of e-mails they received and felt pressured to reply quickly and another 28% said they felt ‘driven’ to do so. Only 38% of respondents were able to to wait a day or longer to respond to e-mails, without feeling the need to instantly reply. Female workers were found to feel the pressure to respond to e-mails more than men, causing higher levels of anxiety.

A further complaint was that workers felt the need to constantly switch between the screen they were working on and their inbox to check for urgent e-mails, thus leading to a feeling of being ‘invaded’ by the e-mails, and an inability to concentrate on their work. The survey of 200 workers conducted by the universities indicated that whilst e-mail is seen as a powerful tool in business, it has now progressed beyond the realm of control, and is seriously affecting the work of employees.

Source:
Times Online

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