Emails cause great stress for office workers

16 August, 2007:

One more item has been added to the list of stress-causing factors in daily office routine: emails.

Emails are causing unprecedented levels of stress among office workers as they struggle to cope with copious flow of incoming messages, a team of researchers in the United Kingdom has found.

And, one in three office workers who use computers regularly suffer from email stress.

The flood of emails also affects the performance of people at work, researchers belonging to Glasgow University and Paisley University have said.

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

Pressure to check and respond quickly to emails makes some employees check their email inboxes up to 40 times an hour!

The research team also found that office workers checked their emails more often than they admitted in a survey.

Half of the 177 participants said they looked at their email more than once an hour, with 35% claiming to check every 15 minutes, but monitoring equipment fitted to their computers showed it was more often.

The research revealed that 34% of participants felt “stressed” by the sheer number of emails and the obligation to respond quickly, and a further 28% said they were “driven” because they saw them as a source of pressure.

The team characterised just 38% as “relaxed” because they did not reply until a day or even a week later.

Karen Renaud, lead researcher, says: “Email 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. Email harries you. You want to know what’s in there, especially if it’s from a family member or from friends, or from your boss, so you break off what you are doing to read the email. 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 emails. The more distracted you are by distractions, including email, then you are going to be more tired and less productive.”