Downsizing Gets You Down

Dr Jerry Teplitz runs seminars on stress management and is the author of Managing Your Stress: How To Relax and Enjoy. Speaking from his US home, and with a US perspective that strikes a chord for Australia too, Teplitz says a wave of downsizing has left the average IT worker feeling more vulnerable and saddled with the tasks of two or three people. He believes IT workers are particularly vulnerable to the damaging effects of long-term stress because as a rule they lack some of the people skills that might help others talk through a problem. Also their devotion to technology means that they are always available since they "festoon themselves with devices such as laptops, mobile phones and the Blackberry, making it more difficult to engineer any real periods of personal downtime".

As one health sector CIO says, "We do work 24x7x365. We try and make it easier if you're [the one] on call and provide the tools to do as much as we can remotely . . . but it restricts your lifestyle."

Teplitz says round-the-clock access to staff is a recipe for high stress. "They need to learn to turn it off." If they do not and their workplace does not demand they take time off, "down the road we will start getting some lawsuits", he warns. Teplitz also says that besides depression and anxiety, other illnesses are stress-related such as heart attacks, strokes and obesity.

"The problem is going on inside the body so you frequently don't see it," he says. "Think of a car where you never change the oil or put air in the tyres. It will work until it collapses. We're not a whole lot better."

It is one of the biggest problems with stress: you can ignore it until it is almost too late.

CIO of Melbourne Health shared IT&T services Mary Wollmering notes that stress "generally hops up on you". Unlike some CIOs who think IT is no more or less prone to stress than any other profession, Wollmering says the expectation of business computer users that IT can fix a problem quickly once they "write a little program" can lead to great stress for the IT worker.

With IT working its way out of the glasshouse and percolating throughout the organization, the IT department has assumed the mantle of a service organization. Wollmering does not believe that the sorts of skills required in the service industry come naturally to all IT workers and this can generate stress. "It's a different sort of person who works in IT. They are often technical people - they like process and procedure," she says. When process and procedure fall down as they tend to in an imperfect world, the stress creeps up.

In order to tackle the problem, Wollmering runs an open door policy and often sits down in the cafeteria to talk through issues with her staff. Being a hospital-based organization there is also a counselling service available to all employees. "Medicine is a very stressful job. You are dealing with people's lives and the hospital is aware of that," she says. Another initiative at Melbourne Health is a peer support system, where employees are provided a telephone number, and if they call in can be connected to one of their specially trained peers who can offer advice and support.

Unfortunately some of the solutions that organizations are putting in place to address stress can have an unforeseen consequence and generate even more stress. According to Wollmering, Melbourne Health has a policy where an employee may not accumulate more than eight weeks' leave - once they get to that limit they have to take some time off. Similarly they cannot accumulate more than two rostered days off - these days also have to be taken. An additional scheme exists where workers can effectively buy additional weeks' holiday by sacrificing part of their annual salary. It's an enlightened attitude toward a work-life balance, but can nevertheless leave departments regularly understaffed.

"This adds stress to my life," Wollmering says, admitting that she herself was the type of person who took her rostered days off and then came into the office anyway.