Message mania raises stress

By Selwyn Parker

Beautiful as e-mail can be, it might be time to adopt a few disciplines before you drown in electronic communications.

Management consultants who are privy to the number of communications that senior executives and middle managers, especially the latter, receive each day, say we were on to something in "Too wired for football", August 25.

"A lot of people don't want to own up to their e-mail problems," said one consultant. "They fear their colleagues will think they can't cope."

But it's not just e-mails; all forms of communication threaten to overwhelm managers.

A study by Gallup in America found that the average executive receives 190 communications a day, or 23 an hour in an eight-hour day, from every possible source. They arrive by e-mail (30), voice messages (22), pager (4), express mail (3) and the rest by telephone, mail and fax.

Conscientious executives try to sort through all this, usually because they worry they might miss something important, but find instead that perhaps 10 per cent of it is useful and maybe one per cent really matters.

The torrent of e-mails will certainly accelerate. Another United States survey by IceGroup, a communications consultancy in Massachusetts, discovered the alarming fact that a quarter of respondents had 250 or more e-mails waiting in their in-boxes.

In many cases this is avoidable. Some people's passion to be wired up is almost a disease. An American business magazine tells of a woman corporate lobbyist who enrolled in a stress management seminar in New York but was asked to leave because her beeper went off so often it distracted her fellow stressed.

No doubt somebody is working on research linking 24-hour communications technology with high levels of stress, but meanwhile, there's little dispute about its results.

A sort of seismic scale of stress drawn up by social scientists predictably puts the death of a spouse at the maximum level of 100, a divorce at 73 and going to jail at 63. However, it's interesting that work-related stress figures high on the scale - being fired rates at 47 and trouble with one's employer rates at 23.

It's probably safe to say that constant phone calls and endless e-mails do nothing to reduce hypertension or high blood pressure, a complaint that has no noticeable symptoms, the textbooks say, but which can damage kidneys and even lead to strokes. There is also an intimidating range of stress-related psychosomatic disorders involving the autonomic nervous system, including some kinds of headaches, facial pain, asthma, stomach ulcers and skin problems.

For Auckland wellness consultant Karen Beard, e-mails are the bete noire in corporate stress. "E-mails contribute hugely to tension," she says.

But solutions are at hand. According to the emerging crop of consultants on how to stem the infotech tide, managers with moderate levels of e-mails should try to deal with all of them as soon as they are opened, even if that means stowing the timeless messages in folders for later.

Use letter-writing techniques rather than memo-writing ones. For example, it's a waste of both your time and the recipient's to dash off a "thanks, Bert, for your invaluable advice" note in response to Bert's e-mailed wisdom. Instead, save the thanks until a later message containing your ordered thoughts on something more important.

Try to remember that not all e-mails are created equal. Companies should set up a system for grading messages starting with "urgent". It might also be a good idea to have a "doesn't matter" grade at the bottom to encourage chronic e-mailers to stop and think before they inflict their random thoughts on yet another victim.

If you want to cut down on e-mail, you first need to start cutting down on the amount you send to others," Beard explains. "Where possible, walk over to the person and have a relevant and meaningful conversation to settle the issue then and there. I see a lot of internal e-mail being used as a butt-covering exercise."

This does however require that divisional heads rid themselves of the suspicion that two people talking around a desk can't be working while one person tapping away at a computer must be.

"Trust that when you see staff walking the floor they are not wasting time," Beard says.

"If staff are talking to each other, then maybe they are solving problems verbally instead of by e-mail."

Beard also advises companies to run competitions for the least number of e-mails per day.

Summarised, Beard's message is that technology is only a tool and should remain so. She has often noticed that companies will cheerfully spend $3 million on the latest information technology, but jib at outlaying a fraction of that on their staff's long-term health.

There's a time not to be wired and, according to most health professionals, one of them is on holidays.

"If at all possible, managers should have a complete break," says Auckland psychologist David Stephen who advises managers on stress management. "Modern tools of communications add to stress."

However it's no good telling some people that. According to Stephen, some managers are so wedded to their work that they check in to the office daily while on holiday because, if they didn't, they would suffer more stress through fretting about the organisation collapsing without them.

The final word should belong to Justin Martin, an American writer on communications technology: "Stay wired all the time and you'll be working all the time."

* Contributing writer Selwyn Parker is available at wordz@xtra.co.nz