E-mail stress out of control

In research published today it has been found that workers are finding the strain of being constantly bombarded with e-mails, and the pressure to respond instantaneously, increasingly hard to bear.

E-mail may be seen as a wonderful invention by many, but the 200 office workers surveyed in a recent research project may be hesitant to agree with you. The results of the research showed that the majority of those questioned felt ‘invaded’ by the inundation of e-mails they received, and felt highly stressed by the pressure to respond to them swiftly. This has led to the newly-coined term of ‘e-mail stress’ being banded about by experts, who say that the situation is getting out of hand. The survey conducted by a joint team from Glasgow and Paisley universities discovered that more than a third of respondents believed they checked their inbox every 15 minutes and 64% of respondents more than once an hour. However when monitors were attached to the computers of those involved in the survey, it was discovered that many of these workers check their e-mails more than forty times an hour, indicating the level of pressure workers feel under to reply to e-mails. The results also imply that workers may be under even more pressure than they estimate, leading to unproductivity and anxiety in the workforce. Only 38% of respondents said that they felt able to to wait a day or longer before responding to e-mails.

The survey also discovered that workers felt the need to constantly switch between applications on their computer to their inbox to check if they had received any urgent e-mails. This means that employees’ work is often interrupted and workers feel constantly on edge. The team who carried out the research stated that changes had to be made to the way e-mail is perceived by workers and those sending them to avoid the technology phenomenon becoming a modern menace.

Source:

Times Online