Career Development WorkPlaceTechnology and Stress
Technology has helped business in many ways. Technology enabled everyone to communicate with each other at will. PDAs and Laptops could be taken everywhere and they could still work even without an office setting. Office workers could still receive an email even at home and would be updated of anything that’s going on in the office.
That could sound very good, however, everyone has started to use email incessantly it has become a problem. An email is sent even for just a small thing and every person “slightly” concerned of the information are now being cc’ed. Because office workers don’t want to lose their job because of the lack of information, they get paranoid and often check their email which leads them to disrupt some of their operations. In fact, there are office workers who spend more than an hour at work doing research and replying to email.
This causes stress in most office workers especially to the upper management. The managers, unfortunately, receive a ton of email that a manager of a 50-people workforce could spend more than four hours answering and reading emails only. They are constantly being cc’ed with the official communication by their employees. So many unnecessary data is sent that so much time is spent deleting the email.
Worst, emails have become the cause of problem and office disruptions. Because office workers cc everyone, the people who read the email start sending in suggestions, which causes more email.
Command and Control
If you are working with this environment, better act on this problem before it rises into catastrophic level. Entry level employees may not feel this for now but office managers are certainly feeling the pressure of constantly checking their email for updates. There are smarter and better ways to control information overflow that would be beneficial for office workers and managers.
Centralized Information
Instead of allowing office employees to send email incessantly, it could be a better idea to establish a place for centralized information. Office intranets could be used as a tool for resources and data. Instead of cramming the server with repeated information, intranet will serve to be a place where any information and data should be extracted.
Office workers could just upload their information in the intranet and managers could just check on the information as they wish. This reduces the need to send an email. Besides, managers will always look for information in their own time and access to the intranet is better than incessant email.
On the other hand if intranet is not possible for the company, structuring emails could also help. This will help office employees identify the email immediately even without reading. If it’s an urgent data, deviating from the structure would signal everyone that there’s an urgent message that should be read.
Of course nothing beats the idea of switching off your Blackberry and PDA for a good amount of time. Office workers could concentrate on their work and if there’s really something important, they can still be reached with a simple phone call.
