[wordup] Too much technology diminishes work relationships

[Adam Shand]

From:http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2001436284_neds08.html

Too much technology diminishes work relationships, author says

Friday, August 08, 2003, 03:34 P.M. Pacific
By Monica Soto
Seattle Times technology reporter

Tim Sanders has spent his career promoting the use of technology, and 
it's in this quest that he experienced his darkest of moments.

Sanders, the chief solutions officer at Yahoo!, said his career was 
thriving in the mid-1990s, yet he began to feel increasingly empty. He 
noticed colleagues sending him instant messages from 5 feet away. He 
watched brilliant engineers slowly replace face-to-face relationships 
with lower-risk contact online.

"I saw a paradox," he said, "a world of community with loneliness."

Sanders came to define the condition as "New Economy Depression 
Syndrome," a state of work-related stress brought on by information 
overload, constant interruption by technology (think e-mail, instant 
messaging and cell phones) and the increasing personal isolation that 
technology affords us.

Sanders will speak about his theory today at the Bellevue Hyatt in a 
lecture titled "Conquering New Economy Depression Syndrome." The event 
is sponsored by the Northwest Entrepreneur Network.

In Sanders' case, the syndrome meant restlessness at night and never 
seeming to be emotionally present at home. He began to have relationship 
difficulties at work because he used e-mail, at one point, to 
communicate everything to his employees, be it good or bad.

"When you're good with a hammer, you treat everything like a nail," he 
said of his bluntness via e-mail. "All of sudden, I forgot my manners."

Major shift for workers

To be sure, U.S. workers in the past decade have been forced to adapt to 
an amazing rate of change in communication technology, from desktop 
computers and personal digital assistants to cell phones and the Internet.

In an even shorter period of time, workers have become increasingly 
dependent on technology to conduct business. In research sponsored by 
storage-software company Veritas, a third of chief information officers 
and information-technology managers said a week without a working 
corporate e-mail system would be more traumatic than a car accident or 
getting a divorce.

"We're now being asked to adapt to so much change so quickly," said 
Donald Hantula, a professor of organizational psychology at Temple 
University. "That's where I think the stress, the strain, the issues 
people bring up, all come from."

David Shenk, author of "Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut," 
first noticed the notion of information overload a decade ago. He had 
signed up for the Federal News Service, a wire service that provided 
transcripts to key political and cultural events via the fax machine.

In addition to wire reports, Shenk was reading three newspapers, 
periodicals and listening to talk radio. After one month, he pulled the 
plug on the wire service.

Shenk said he had come to rely on technology to the extent that he 
wasn't placing enough confidence in his own faculties. Life was a series 
of trade-offs and he had chosen technology without understanding the 
implications on other areas of his life.

"We have all sorts of new choices, but certain resources don't change," 
he said. "There's still exactly 24 hours in the day. We still need to 
sleep the same amount. One of the keys is that we make the choices — we 
don't let technologies make the choices for us."

Computer-limit benefits

New research suggests that limiting our use of technology might be good 
for your health. A study by Chiba University in Tokyo found that 
spending five hours or more in front of a computer increased a person's 
risk of depression, insomnia and other mental-health-related diseases.

The study, which monitored the mental-health changes of 25,000 Japanese 
high-tech workers over three years, found that employees who worked five 
hours or more in front of a computer were more prone to depression and 
anxiety. The results were published late last year in the American 
Journal of Industrial Medicine.

So is too much technology bad for us?

Yahoo's Sanders has spent the past year collecting anecdotal evidence. 
After writing the book "Love is the Killer App: How to Win Business and 
Influence Friends," he received thousands of e-mails from hospitals, 
health-care professionals and organizations that provided anecdotal 
evidence of how technology adversely affects people.

After one speech in particular, he received e-mail reports about small 
groups of engineers within a company that had become completely 
electronic, including how they communicated with colleagues.

"The turnover rate was astronomical," Sanders said of those groups. 
"They were the worst people to work with. They took nerd and created 
monster or troll. These were very lonely, depressed, negative, 
anti-social, brilliant people."

Theory to be tested

Because most of his examples are anecdotal, Sanders has teamed with 
Heart Math, a research, training and consulting company, to 
scientifically test his theory.

Heart Math, which advises Fortune 500 companies on reducing stress and 
enhancing employee performance, administered a digital lifestyle survey, 
the results of which are expected to be released Labor Day weekend.

Dr. Terry Real, a national best-selling author on male depression, will 
conduct follow-up interviews with survey respondents. Sanders said the 
goal is to create a clinical analysis and come up with specific 
treatments. "(Dr. Real's) trying to figure out how to identify medically 
sound solutions," he said.

Sanders said he's learned to balance his use of technology with stronger 
relationships at work. He turns off his computer monitor, for example, 
when someone comes into his office. He sits down more with colleagues 
and makes eye contact.

"I realized the relationships were my resiliency — that the friends and 
the colleagues that I had during the day made all the difference because 
the weekends and evenings weren't cutting it," he said. "It wasn't 
enough to recharge me. That evaporated in traffic the next morning."

Monica Soto: 206-515-5632 or msoto at seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company