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A new workers’ plague

London: Workers are suffering from the growing problem of “e-mail stress” as they struggle to cope with an unending tide of messages, new research reveals. Employees are becoming tired, frustrated and unproductive after constantly monitoring the electronic messages that keep interrupting them as they try to concentrate at work.

Academics who carried out the research recommends that staff check their messages just a few times a day to reduce stress levels, safeguard their health and stop feeling “invaded” by e-mail.

Computer scientist Karen Renaud of Glasgow University, with psychologist Judith Ramsay of Paisley University and her colleague Mario Hair, a statistician, surveyed 177 persons, mainly academics and those involved in creative jobs, to see how they dealt with e-mails received at work.

They found that 34 per cent of workers felt stressed by the sheer number of e-mails and an obligation to respond quickly, and a further 28 per cent were driven because they saw them as a source of pressure. They characterised just 38 per cent as relaxed because they did not reply until a day or even a week later. They also found that employees working on a computer typically switched applications to view their e-mails as many as 30 or 40 times an hour, for anything from a few seconds to a minute. While half the participants said they checked more than once an hour and 35 per cent said they did so every 15 minutes, monitoring software fitted to their machines for the experiment showed it was more often. “This indicates the astonishing extent to which email is embedded in our day-to-day lives.”

They uncovered evidence of pressure: respondents generally felt they had to respond more quickly to emails to meet expectations of senders.

They say: “Females, in particular, tended to feel more pressure to respond than males. Many individuals seem to feel pressured by e-mail and feel this pressure negatively as stress.”

Mr. Renaud said: “E-mail is the thing that now causes us the most problems in our working lives. It’s an amazing tool, but it’s got out of hand. E-mail harries you. You want to know what’s in there, especially if it’s from a family member or friends, or your boss, so you break off what you are doing to read it.

“The problem is that when you go back to what you were doing, you’ve lost your chain of thought and, of course, you are less productive. People’s brains get tired from breaking off from something every few minutes to check e-mails. The more distracted you are by distractions, including email, then you are going to be more tired and less productive.”

Workers in creative occupations or jobs involving periods of concentration focussing on getting an important project finished — such as academics, writers, architects and journalists — were likely to be worst affected, she said, while those in call centres for whom constant e-mails were integral to their work would not have the same problem.

Recipients should not constantly monitor their e-mails since this will affect their work. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

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