Email stress? If you told the kids today…
Email stress was not the beginning
Over the past year there have been a number of investigations into the stress caused by having constant access to emails. A report that hit the press today refers to the constant access to emails as a ‘double edged sword’. It acknowledges the benefits and the stress caused by emails being pushed to us 24 hours a day. Having worked in the IT and telecommunications service industry for all of my working life, I have always found it more stressful to be without emails.
I spent 33 years on call, even when on holiday, and I much preferred having email alerts than phone calls. In my opinion it is much more stressful receiving a phone call in the middle of the night, especially when we had the old telephones with bells that could not be toned down. It was like being awakened by a fire alarm, my usual reaction was to leap out of bed as someone had thrown a bucket of iced water over me.
“In my own experience it was much more stressful being on call before we had appropriate technology.”
Even though I am not on first or even second line call these days, old habits die hard and I still find it stressful when I am offline. So much so that when I am away on holiday or working away in a hotel I turn into the proverbial grumpy old man if I am unable to get good Internet access. Most of the people I know in the industry and in my customers’ industries feel the same.
Another report back in June 2015 made the observation that receiving good news about projects or problem resolutions caused a positive reaction in the recipients. It also said that misinterpreted emails and emails with negative content caused more stress but as emails with a negative tone were more likely to get a response. Maybe the researchers should have gone back a little further to look at email etiquette and management style and the potential lack of common curtesy to get to the real problem.
In my own experience it was much more stressful being on call before we had appropriate technology. When I was first on call I didn’t have any technology and often arrived back to the office to pick up my next job and had to go back to within a few hundred yards of where I had just left because the fault came in a few minutes after I called in from the previous location.
“Finding a working phone box in London in the 70s and early 80s could be extremely challenging…”
When I joined the call out team at Cable & Wireless I was issued with a single tone pager. It was the size of a grand piano and all it could do was bleep when called. This predates mobile phones so if I was out and about I would have to go on search of a public phone box. Finding a working phone box in London in the 70s and early 80s could be extremely challenging, I knew that as much as anyone because in my previous job with Posts Office Telecommunications I was part of a weekend shift team maintaining call boxes following a public outcry that they were always out of order.
To put this in perspective, C&W call out engineers were in a team of one and on my worst night I received eight calls during my 2200 and 0800 shift. Call out engineers were also part of a three man shift team working 0800 to 1700 or 1500 to 2200 which we had to work while covering the on call rota.
If that wasn’t stressful enough, when we did arrive on site and were unable to effect a repair we would have to go back to the workshop to get a spare. These spares were very heavy steel rack mounted equipment. On one occasion I was called out to a customer on the 13th floor (that wasn’t wasted on me at the time) of an office block in Moorgate. When I arrived at 2000 on a Saturday evening I discovered the lift was out of order. I walked up 26 flights of stairs to investigate the problem. That is dedication to duty.
“…in a state of total exhaustion I had to work out how to install it because I had never seen one before. Unfortunately, Google was 20 years away.”
Having climbed to what felt like the top of Everest with a heavy tool case I discovered the Wiltek tape store unit had failed completely. I removed the tape store from the rack and carried it down 26 flights of stairs and returned to the workshop. I found a spare unit and drove back to the customer hoping the lift service had been restored but alas that wasn’t to be. I climbed 26 flights of stairs again but this time with a very heavy tape store unit. I arrived back at the customer’s office with the tape store and then in a state of total exhaustion I had to work out how to install it because I had never seen one before. Unfortunately, Google was 20 years away.
On a serious note, I used the word ‘stressful’ but I don’t remember us referring to it as stress back then. However, I do remember colleagues being taken ill, suffering injuries and having accidents that nowadays may be referred to as ‘work related’. The majority of us suffered in some way, especially back injuries due to the weight of the equipment we were carrying around. I believe our working conditions were much tougher back then. We just got on with it because everyone else in the team was in the same situation. I appreciate more is known about the effects of stress now, but there are many factors adding to the stresses of our working lives – email is only part of the story. We need to dig much deeper to find the root causes.
“Maybe they remember the single tone pagers that ruined their suit pockets and their lives…”
Every business is having to work much smarter and harder with less resource to achieve the same results. These demands and pressures on business owners and boards of directors inevitably filter down to the workforce. I don’t know of any organisation with spare resource so any overload has to be absorbed. I have no answers but I am certain email is only part of the problem, and an effect rather than a cause.
One of the reports stated that younger people are more affected by email stress than older people. It made the point that in their research, the older the subject the less stressed they were. Maybe like me, the older people in the research remember what it was like before we had the technology to make our lives easier. Maybe they remember the single tone pagers that ruined their suit pockets and their lives while they searched high and low for a working public phone box.
I must admit that while writing this blog the Monty Python Four Yorkshiremen sketch springs to mind… “And if you told the kids today they’d never believe you.” Not sure why, but I thought I would share that thought anyway.