InformationWeek

Mounting business pressures and increasing responsibility are piling excessive stress on technology managers

By Marianne Kolbasuk McGee
Issue date: March 4, 1996

It's nearly midnight, and after a long day at the office, you've finally made it home. You switch on your laptop-it's become one of your nightly homecoming rituals-and check your E-mail. There's a message marked "urgent," asking you to attend a meeting tomorrow at 7 a.m.

You settle in for a qui ck five hours of sleep, only to be awakened by the phone at 4:15. It's your overnight systems operations manager: One of the computers is down, and he believes the applications work your team did yesterday might have crashed it. "Dial into the system," he urges. "Take a look." It's hardly life or death, but then again, with your company downsizing, top brass is looking to cut anyone who shows signs of slacking.

Maybe you need to get on it. Or maybe what you really need is a nice, long rest on a faraway island where they've never heard of computers.

Sound familiar? If so, you're suffering from extreme job stress and could be on your way to full-fledged burnout. For information systems workers, burnout can be particularly pronounced and common.

Several new developments contribute to the problem. One is virtual-office technology: Portable PCs, pagers, cellular phones, and wireless E-mail ensure that no one can stay out of touch for long, even on weekends and holida ys. Another is a greater-than-ever demand to learn new skills and keep up with blazingly fast changes in technology.

Then there's pressure from corporate executives who have read a little about information technology and now want to see quick fixes. Another is new demands from increasingly tech-savvy users who want more power, more speed, more results. Finally, corporate downsizing gives fewer IS staff members less time to support more users.

If normal stress is a smoldering ember, total burnout is a five-alarm blaze. Burnout is the ultimate in job dissatisfaction and loss of control. Burned-out workers no longer feel in command of their work, and they often feel out of control of their personal lives as well. Work loses its value, and self-respect takes a sharp drop. "Burned-out workers start to feel helpless," says Bernard Hecker, a social psychologist and director of academic computing at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. "They have a sense that things are spinning out of their control."

Adds Michelle Michels, who previously worked for a Big Six consulting firm, "After I left my last job three years ago, I was so burned out, I thought I'd never want to do this kind of work again."
Burnout brings other problems, too. Physical effects include headaches, appetite loss, crying spells, and sleep problems. In extreme forms, burnout can lead to emotional depression. Not surprisingly, relations with spouses, family, and friends often suffer.

While it's easy to think of burnout as someone else's problem, one person's burnout can hurt everyone in a workgroup. "Their feelings can affect the quality and productivity of their work," Hecker says. "That, in turn, can affect the morale and work of co-workers."

Burnout is also expensive. Stress-related ailments-including those stemming from burnout-cost U.S. corporations as much as $300 billion a year, according to Jeffrey Kahn, a professor of occupational psychiatry at Cornel l University in Ithaca, N.Y., who researches job stress. Kahn's estimate factors in health insurance claims, disability pay, sick days, increased worker turnover, and lost productivity.

Too Little Time
Is burnout worse for IS workers than for others? Some experts say yes. They suggest that an IS person's link to technology can contribute to and heighten burnout. The great accessibility of portable laptops and home PCs equipped with modems, E-mail, groupware, faxes, beepers, cellular phones, and voicemail allows the employee to be linked with the office anytime, anywhere.

Also, IS workers are expected to keep folks in other departments wired around the clock, too. While that may be seen as a business benefit, it can be a nightmare from a personal point of view. "The technology often creates a situation where an IS worker is on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week," says Eileen Canty, an organizational psychologist with William M. Mercer Associates, a human resources an d benefits consulting firm in New York. "There's little time and chance to digress from your job."

Adds a systems programmer at a major book publisher: "You're expected to keep your beeper on and make yourself available on weekends in case there's a problem. Even when you're going on vacation, the boss will say, 'Leave us your number in case something comes up.'"

Although that unbroken link alone probably won't cause burnout, it can be one more issue that, when added to many others, can convince a dissatisfied worker to call it quits. Says former Big Six consultant Michels, "I wasn't working with technologies I was interested in, I was only doing what others wanted of me." On top of that, "everyone else was stressed out, too," creating an anxiety-ridden environment. Now Michels works as an IS consultant for Sterling Information Group in Austin, Texas, a company known for its flex time and other worker-friendly policies (see story, p. 40) .

Another cause of IS burnout: unrealistic demands from nontechnical users. Nontechies often assume that IS people should be able to solve any computer-related problem, anytime. "I've gotten calls at home on weekends from lawyers at my firm," says the systems administrator for a Garden City, N.Y., law firm. "They want me to instruct them on how to set up their home computers or to teach their wives word processing."

If anything, the hype surrounding the Internet, online services, and the World Wide Web has made the problem worse. "I can't even go into the ladies' room without someone asking me about their printer," says the law-firm systems administrator. "At times it gets so frustrating, I want to cry."

Another factor: Because computer and communications technology often provides the tools that companies use to reengineer and downsize, IS workers can be left feeling guilty as they watch others in their company lose their job s-jobs that they, the IS staff, helped eliminate.

At the same time, IS workers have to wonder if they'll be the next to be laid off. "During a downsizing, you'll usually see a big, temporary gain in productivity out of people's fear of losing their jobs," says Robert Zawacki, a Colorado Springs, Colo., consultant and author of Transforming The Mature Information Technology Organization (EagleStar, 1995). "After a downsizing, an IS person is angry, exhausted, and wondering where [his] future is."

Zawacki and others say IS managers can make staffers feel valuable by praising them for jobs well done and offering time off in recognition of long hours, even if it's not formally offered by the corporation. "Comp time is a gesture of good will," says psychologist Canty.

Flex time helps IS workers at retailer Toys R Us cope with the busy holiday season, which lasts from September to January. "People get burnt. The hours are long, you're always on call, a nd you can never be down," says Matt Lombardi, VP of information systems for the giant retailer. "And if you're implementing new software and it's riddled with bugs, things can get really stressed." While Toys R Us doesn't permit comp time, Lombardi gives staffers an occasional long weekend "when
things have been crazy and a lot of long hours have been worked."

But some technology managers deny that burnout is worse in the IS group than it is in other parts of the organization. "You'll always have some people complaining that they are burned out, but that's probably the case for all types of jobs," says George Brenner, CIO of MCA Universal Studios Inc. in Universal City, Calif. "It's no different today than 20 years ago. Burnout will occur no matter what."

"Everyone has stress-unless they're dead," says Roger Herman, a workplace consultant in Akron, Ohio. "But the difference between burnout and regular stress is that feeling of lost control."
There are things built into IS work-such as the ability to take the technology home to do the work-that can be both good and bad when it comes to dealing with stress and levels of work control. Problems occur, Herman explains, when too many demands and "negative factors" pile up.

Playing As A Team
Nonetheless, many companies offer programs, both formal and informal, to help IS workers manage stress and prevent burnout. Coors Brewing Co. encourages technology departments and teams to hold social events at the end of short-term projects and between longer ones. Group activities at the Golden, Colo., brewery have included picnic lunches, pot-luck dinners, and outings to baseball and hockey games. "The feeling that no one is doing their job alone-that everyone is a contributor-is very important here," says Lisa Anderson, a Coors IT project manager.

While Anderson claims that "burnout has never been a very big problem" at Coors' I S department, she concedes that some people have left the beer-making company because of too much stress or boredom from long-term projects. "The longer projects are tougher," she says. To help, Coors' IS managers try to break up monotony by rotating some jobs.

Similarly, consultant Zawacki helped ITT Hartford, a large insurance company, relieve worker stress during a corporate downsizing by encouraging the firm to create a pool of IS workers available for different projects. IS employees at the insurer were able to keep their jobs while varying their day-to-day work.

"The effort put into these jobs was great because the IS people wanted to impress their new business unit bosses," Zawacki says.

Jack Crawford, senior VP of information management at ITT Hartford, admits the program worked well. However, he declined to talk about past efforts to conquer burnout-ironically, because the company just went public and has split into different business operations. "P rograms that worked in the past aren't necessarily ones that will be used now," says Crawford.

Yet while variety can help keep IS workers fresh, too much change and uncertainty about work can be as damaging as no change at all. "There is a risk of burnout in any business where workers face a lot of change," says Steve Zarate, CIO at PeopleSoft Inc. and previously the Pleasanton, Calif., software vendor's VP of human resources.

What can IS workers do for themselves? The most effective technique may be to be more assertive. It just might be time to speak up to that insensitive boss or pushy co-worker. "Sometimes you just have to say no to requests that go beyond what's reasonable," says the law firm systems administrator.

If that doesn't help, Sterling's Michels suggests another tactic: Turn off your pager.

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