StressIT?

Prevent, a company dealing with preventive work environment, is investing in "IT stress"and published a survey on this phenomenon the other week. According to the company, examples of IT stress include employees not being able to set boundaries between work and leisure, being stressed by unmanageable information flows or IT tools increasing mechanical routine work.

I recognize that information overload. I read a couple of years ago that we get as much information in one day as the 18th century man got in his entire lifetime. Who hasn't felt brain-overflow in trying to read everything exciting that is published, or sighed heavily over all the emails that fall in during a day. IT not only gives us access to all this information, it also gives us the tools to manage it.

After Prevent's press release on the report, several media had headlines about IT stress, and I sensed disaster figures from the survey. But on the contrary, it showed that most people were very positive and did not feel IT stress at all. Over 70% feel that the amount of information they receive in their work is just right and that they had time to evaluate and prioritize it. 80% of officials think that IT makes their work more varied and the same number thought that new IT tools are easy and quick to learn. And speaking of the risk of boundary-less work, over 80% thought they could set limits to their work and 75% responded that the possibility of boundary-less work is generally positive.

Most negatively, 20% feel that they are not able to respond quickly to email enquiries. This feels very familiar.

From a work environment perspective, it is good to understand how IT tools affect people. We have a lot to learn about how IT systems can become more user-friendly, and there are still many systems in operation that are past their best-before date. But you can clearly see how positive new technology at work is for people's jobs and leisure time.