IT managers are 'unaware' of pressures of job
A report into the work-life balance that IT managers enjoy has suggested that unspoken concerns about busy schedules and hectic workplaces can lead towards employees leaving and heightened workplace stress.
According to the first PagerDuty “The state of IT work-life balance” report, those IT managers who are oblivious to the stresses and time commitments of their day-to-day are more likely to lose staff.
Of more than 800 IT professionals surveyed from the UK, US and Australia, more than half (51.3 per cent) said that their personal life and sleeping routines were affected more than 10 times every week by being on-call for service outages. Of those, the vast majority - 94 per cent - said it was also disrupting their family lives.
Just shy of a quarter of those surveyed said being “always-on” means that their family lives can be so disturbed that they would describe their jobs as “unmanageable”. Around half of respondents also noted that a lack of sleep has a knock-on effect on their productivity at work
As a result, 23.1 per cent of IT managers say that they would leave their job in pursuit of a good work-life balance in the future. Just under 1 in 5 - 18.1 per cent - describe their current work-life balance as “fair to poor”, while 56.7 per cent say that poor sleep, out of hours work and a lack of balance is “just part of the job”.
Others might be critically unaware of the damage a stressful work life might be causing. Of those surveyed, 72 per cent say that their managers have little or no idea of the impact that workplace stress is causing their colleagues.
Steve Barrett, head of EMEA at PagerDuty, said there was a consistent trend for IT workers to keep quiet about the negative impacts that on-call work is having on their mental health and personal relationships.
This problem will get worse, Barrett continues, as users come to expect digital services to be constantly accessible and working whenever they want them to be.
“When you look at the expanded internet of things economy, other digital services, this is going to become even more of a problem. The appetite today, where everyone wants everything instantly, is only going to increase,” he explained.
