A few weeks ago there was a spate of blog posts and tweets asking “Does email lead to suicide?”
At the basis of this were reports that the management of France Telecom was taking action to stave a wave of employee suicides. One of the less sensationalist reports about this is this one, in The Independent; and even this one is titled “Exec: Email is causing killer stress”. So – is it true?
As to the facts (an oft neglected little matter, facts): turns out that a France Telecom official was commenting on a series of employee suicides in that corporation, which he attributed to employees being stressed:
Chief Financial Officer Gervais Pellissier told Reuters that 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.
Well, that is very true. However, can we therefore assume that the unfortunate employees took their own lives because of Information Overload? Two other facts come out in the article:
- The company has been going through a major restructuring, leading to layoffs of some 20% of the workforce; possibly quite a bit more stressing than one’s Blackberry.
And,
- “Not all the France Telecom suicides were job-related and it wasn’t immediately clear if the total of 23 over 18 months was more than would be expected normally in a population of 100,000, the size of the company’s French work force. The French suicide rate was 15 per 100,000 people in the entire French population in 2004, the latest available year of data”.
Now, you don’t need to be a statistics professor to do the math: the suicide rate in that company, however tragic, is identical to the nationwide average!
I can see how “Does email lead to suicide?” is a catchier headline than “Even layoffs didn’t raise employee suicide rate above normal”… and I do applaud France Telecom management for taking the matter seriously and looking for ways to help their people cope in difficult times, as we are told they have. But what about email?
Certainly none of the data in the papers shows any convincing connection. I claim no authoritative knowledge here, but personally, I certainly think Information Overload causes stress, which is a bad thing that I’ve devoted years of my life to changing; yet I doubt that its impact on suicide can be significant. There are much worse things in a workplace and in life in general. I also note that life in past centuries, before the invention of the BlackBerry, was also hard and stressful, often in ways far worse than we can grasp today (just try to imagine the life of a French peasant during the 14th century’s wars and plagues, long before France Telecom’s arrival on the scene).
What do you think?
Of course email cannot be regarded as directly causal in the FT suicides – although it made for good headlines in a couple of papers. Although information overload may not be the issue here, FT is clearly making life very unpleasant for a lot of long-serving engineers by pushing them into pressurised call centre roles. I think they are being misleading about the stats that compare their suicide rate with the rest of the population. I mentioned this to a university lecturer in wellbeing at work over the weekend and he made a point that now seems obvious to me. The wider population does not comprise just working adults – it will include teenagers, the mentally or terminally ill etc. So the rate at FT is hugely out of the ordinary. Many of the suicides left notes blaming work or killed themselves AT work. FT does have a serious problem.
That is a very good point, Ian; thank your lecturer friend for me for pointing it out. And given what you share about the situation there, one must wonder – perhaps the Blackberries and Email are being picked on to deflect attention from other issues?