IT workers suffer high stress levels

NEWS The IT sector is the most stressful environment to work in, according to a report to be published by Cyborg Systems, a human resources management systems specialist. The research comes from a sample of 115 organisations with workforces of between 500 to 5,000 employees. Just under half of respondents said stress levels are rising as a whole, but over two thirds of responses from the IT sector think stress at work is on the increase. Over a third of those questioned think stress caused absenteeism and those few organisations that quantified the loss of man hours as a result of this said the loss of revenue could amount to as much as £2m. Other human resources issues to emerge from the report point to two areas of concern. Respondents think payroll could become a serious problem if the UK embraces European Monetary Union, as only 55 per cent of organisations involved in the survey have payroll systems that could cope with the Euro. Similarly, a significant segment of the respondents identified the Working Time Directive, due to be enacted into legislation later this year, as a future issue for human resources departments. The directive intends to limit the amount of hours in the working week. As a consequence, companies will have to identify their employment needs more accurately. Commenting on the responses, Cyborg said organisations will need to rely on resource management systems to cope with the demand of the Directive.