http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE58N6ES20090924 France Telecom CFO blames email for staff stress Thu Sep 24, 2009 7:37pm EDT By Sinead Carew NEW YORK (Reuters) - A top executive at France's biggest telecommunications company, which is dealing with a spate of suicides, warned that the barrage of emails from smartphones and personal computers was stressing out employees. While France Telecom Chief Financial Officer Gervais Pellissier did not directly blame suicides on around-the-clock email, he said workers in all big companies are under more pressure in the age of the BlackBerry. "Today for people working in business, whatever the level, whether they are CEO or even first- or second-rank level employees, they are always connected," he told Reuters in an interview on Thursday. France Telecom, which operates under the Orange brand, has come under public scrutiny after 22 workers committed suicide and another 13 attempted to kill themselves since the start of 2008. Pellissier said some employees were clearly feeling a lot of pressure due to the privatization of France Telecom, but he added that this was compounded by new technologies that cause work to encroach increasingly on personal lives. "When you were an average employee in a big corporation 15 years ago, you had no mobile phone or no PC at home. When you were back home, work was out," he said. Research in Motion's popular BlackBerry has been dubbed CrackBerry in the United States, where some users say they are addicted to checking emails. Pellissier said such practices may be taking a bigger toll on workers than has been acknowledged by his company or others. As a result a fragile employee with difficulties would probably have more confusion with "more mixture between personal life and professional life than in the past." "That is probably something we've not undertaken, not only at France Telecom but, it's more a global society issue, the impact of the new ways of working on personal behavior," Pellissier said. He did not say how the balance could be addressed but noted that his company was taking the suicides very seriously. France Telecom Chief Executive Didier Lombard said earlier this month the company was adding surveillance and counseling services as the pace of suicides among employees had picked up. One man had stabbed himself in the stomach during a staff meeting while a woman threw herself out a window. Pellissier talked about stress caused by workers changing jobs, skills and locations as France Telecom recreates itself as a private company from a government agency. More than 15,000 of its roughly 102,000 workers had big job changes in the last five years as a result of the privatization, he said. He said the company would have to do a lot in the coming weeks to help resolve the suicide problem. "It's a serious issue. We have to deal with it," he said. (Reporting by Sinead Carew; Editing by Richard Chang and Steve Orlofsky) ------------------------------------ Didn't find this posted before. A friend of mine lamented about carrying a BlackBerry given by his company. That means he'd have to work even during weekends or holidays as he can't 'pretend' to have no email access. I work in a telco too but I'd only check my mails on Sunday morning (during weekend), just to be sure I have enough time to react should something important come up. Still, it sucks when I read mails like "I want it sent over by Sunday evening for Monday's meeting at 9am".
What's wrong with working on the weekend? Its not like you have to work a whole day. Just a few hours isn't too bad.
<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/jHPOzQzk9Qo&hl=en&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/jHPOzQzk9Qo&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>
I would think he'd want to do some investigating before saying it's the Crackberries. Maybe they have already, but it sounds like an off-the-cuff rationalization of a serious organizational problem.
The thing I look most forward to every time I go on vacation is getting rid of my cell. I don't wanna be connected. There are some days while I'm on the phone I will get like 2-3 voicemails cause I couldn't switch over. At the same time receiving a couple of text messages and a bunch of emails. In a given day I average about 75 calls, 10 voicemails, 25 emails and 25 text messages. My highest: 225 calls, 20 voicemails, and about 50 emails and text which all happened on the same day. I hate cell phones!
Blackberry stressing you out? Turn it off. That wasn't so hard, was it? People connect themselves because they want to. If your job expects you to be available and responsive 24/7, then you should either get paid accordingly, or find another job. If you don't want to be connected as much, simply don't connect. I could do lots of work on weekends since I can remote in, but I deliberately avoid doing so quite often just so I can relax. No one has any problem with that, because guess what, it's the weekend.
