Time.news – We certainly live in fast times, perhaps too fast. And we feel compelled to adapt to their rhythm at all times. For example, when a message arrives we feel obliged to reply immediately because we are always connected and we fear that on the other end of the wi-fi they are impatient for an answer. Well? Well, a study today reveals that the stress generated by e-mails “psychologically affects employees and the people close to them”, reports the Paìs. An example?
At eight o’clock in the evening the phone vibrates with a notification. It’s an email from the boss on a Sunday. Tom doesn’t answer because it’s not urgent, but he can’t even get it out of his mind. “If work is the last thing anyone thinks about before they go to sleep, something is probably wrong,” said William Becker, a professor at Virginia Tech University and co-author of the study examining the effect of emails on the well-being of people and the surrounding environment.
Email stress has a name and it’s e-anxiety. The researchers interviewed more than 400 employees in various work sectors confirming that excessive checking of e-mail during non-work hours “is harmful to well-being and relationships” and constitutes a red alert, “but even thinking about it is itself harmful ”. Because “seeing your boss always check your e-mail, knowing that he will then send it on the weekend or at night, creates expectation.
Therefore, it doesn’t matter what company policy or the law is” because “if you feel pressure from your boss, it will take precedence over everything else”Becker explains. Therefore the negative effect of all this is inevitably transmitted to the partner or children as the person concerned “cannot completely free himself from work”. And this happens more frequently during free time or while personal or family commitments are being carried out. “Interruptions or distractions that increase the employee’s conflict and feelings of anxiety” that reverberate in the surrounding environment.
Is there a remedy? Experts agree that the speed of responses at work is part of the “culture of immediacy” of our times, and the remedy lies in this: “The perception of urgency is not necessarily real and can be regulated”, therefore it is it is necessary to learn to distinguish between “urgent and important” and to establish attitudes that modulate behaviour, “how to rationally choose the moment of response, measure access to applications and analyze requests and expectations”.
A report prepared by the Fremap company, which analyzed 380,000 sickness absences out of a sample of 3 million people, shows that between 2015 and 2021 the average incidence of temporary disability processes due to mental and behavioral disorders (Tmc) is increased by 17% for all age groups.
In 2021, if you ignore the impact of Covid-19,”mental illnesses were then the cause of the request for 15% of the rest days”, the second most representative cause only behind musculoskeletal disorders. All this, in addition to the effects on people, also weighs on the company accounts: the temporary disability processes have caused in Spain “an average salary and contribution cost of 2,053.36 euros per leave in 2021”, again according to the same report.