Stress at the office, say scientists at University College London, might be killing you. Perhaps literally.
The UCL's Department of Epidemiology and Public Health says there’s a direct biological link between workplace worry and coronary heart disease . And it’s not doing this by simply encouraging bad eating habits, a sedentary lifestyle and other activities that promote coronary artery disease.
You’ve read stories like this before, of course, but the UCL, which performed a 12-year-long study of 10,308 male and female London-based civil servants, says it’s the first time researchers have found there are mechanisms that associate stress and heart disease, a relastionship that has been suspected for some time but not proved. The study said that stress disturbs the interaction of the hypothalamic, pituitary and adrenal systems, sending signals to the heart that could lead to cardiac instability.
Worse, the association of stress and coronary heart disease was stronger among people under 50 years of age, who experienced a risk of 68 per cent more than among those who said they were not stressed at the office.
Why does this interest a tech columnist?
First, because developments in high technology have been implicitly understood to make life easier. And this study shows they haven’t.
At least, many tech systems and services have been designed to increase productivity — that’s why so many software packages are being marketed as “productivity” suites, meaning a workplace’s productivity would jump using these tools.
This begs several questions. First, do things like word processors, spreadsheets and collaborative tools have a built-in stress factor that no one is measuring? Or do employers, having shelled out a lot of money on the latest technology, so frustrated with the lack of a direct correlation with rising profits that they are taking it out on their employees? Or is it something entirely different — such as pressure from shareholders for ever-greater profits, a pressure increasingly felt from the beginning of the tech revolution and continuing to this day despite bursting economic bubbles?
Most interesting, however, is a survey by the Policy Studies Institute, which found that “Big Brother” electronic surveillance systems — including security cameras, key-logging software, e-mail sniffing and telephone monitoring — can fuel stress at work , which in turns creates employee churn, which is rate at which employees want to change jobs.
Tech was supposed to cure all this, not create it.
Where did it go so wrong?
