British workers are suffering stress from an avalanche of email and the need to respond quickly. A survey of 177 participants showed the following:
- 64% of the participants said they looked at their email more than once an hour, with 35 per cent claiming to check every 15 minutes. (Daily Mail)
- When researchers fitted monitors to their computers, workers were found to be viewing e-mails up to 40 times an hour. (The Times)
- About 33 per cent said they felt stressed by the volume of e-mails and the need to reply quickly.(The Times)
- 28 per cent said they felt “driven” when they checked messages because of the pressure to respond. (The Times)
- Just 38 per cent of workers were relaxed enough to wait a day or longer before replying. (The Times)
- Female workers felt under greater pressure to respond than men. (Daily Mail)
- Employees in creative jobs or work that requires long periods of concentration to get an important project finished, such as academics, writers, architects and journalists, were likely to be worst affected. (Daily Mail)
The widely reported study was just released by professors Karen Renaud. a computer scientist at Glasgow University and Judith Ramsay, a psychologist at Paisley University in Scotland. The study has the boring title of "The Influence of Self-Esteem and Locus of Control on Perceived Email-Related Stress" and appears in the November 2007 issue of Computers in Human Behavior.
They concluded: “E-mail has become an indispensable tool in business. However, there is evidence that e-mail can exert a powerful hold over its users and that many computer users experience stress as a result of e-mail-related pressure.”
Ms Renaud said in the Times: “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.”
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