No rest for the weary techie

Does your workload make you want to do this?

The state of the economy, and the job market that it is dragging down with it, may or may not have affected you yet. Your company may be mired in whatever language they use for layoffs, cutbacks, downsizings, rollbacks or "how about we all use a few less paper clips this month?" or it may be skirting by, fingers crossed, hoping the credit crisis doesn't swoop down and make an example of it. (And if you're in that camp, let us all hope that it stays that way)

But one thing that is abundantly clear is that whether your employment situation makes it out of this recession intact, your nerves may not. A little-discussed sobering truth about surving a round of layoffs is that your workload can often double or triple, leaving the consolation prize of "But at least you still have a job!" that much harder of a pill to swallow.

A new survey of CIOs illustrates this point, wherein more than one-third (36 percent) said rising workloads were the greatest source of stress for their teams. And although "too much work to do" may sounds like a relatively good problem in light of the current economy, “overstressed IT workers are unlikely to perform at their best. The pressure of mounting workloads, combined with ever-evolving technologies and office politics, can quickly erode morale and adversely affect productivity," explained Katherine Spencer Lee, executive director of Robert Half Technology, the IT staffing firm that published the study.

Of course, these results should be little surprise to IT workers feeling the brunt of the rising workloads, especially in light of dialed-back IT budgets and frozen hiring plans. Let us only hope that stress will not be so much that we'll have a whole 'nother batch of cracked technology professionals...

How about you? Have you been stressed by an increased workload as a result of money problems at your company?