We need to talk about wellness in tech
As Mental Health Awareness Week draws to a close, we ask if and why tech has a problem with mental health, and what we can do to improve it.
As we come to the end of Mental Health Awareness Week, the challenges to our collective mental wellbeing are considerable. The cost of living is continuing to keep millions awake at night, and of course it follows the pandemic which left many people with depleted resilience. Throw in global instability, existential fears of climate breakdown and a political discourse mired in misinformation and fury, and it seems genuinely miraculous that anyone is getting by unmedicated.
Tech workers and leaders are as affected as anyone else by these issues but are subject to two, industry specific sources of pressure. The first is the way that the pandemic increased the pace and profile of digitisation which has had profound consequences, not least in terms of the way that we work and the cyber threat landscape. The second is the seemingly never-ending announcements of redundancies in the sector.
Recent research published in this area surveyed more than 30,000 tech workers around the world during 2021 and found that 2 in 5 were at high risk of burn out, 42% of those were considering quitting within 6 months, and 62% reported feeling physically and emotionally drained. 2021 was a particularly challenging year in tech for pandemic related reasons, but it's unlikely that all of those individuals found themselves with time on their hands to recharge after the acute crisis phase of Covid passed.
More recently, a study of CISOs published earlier this year found 65% admitting that their stress levels are compromising their ability to protect their organisations, and nearly 80% said that work induced stress impacts their physical and mental health and their sleep.
Jason Townsend, Information Security Development Analyst at University of Kent defines the vicious cycle of complexity, stress, burnout and attrition that so many tech teams face.
"I think that with the increasing burden of complexity being put on individuals, we are more prone to burnout. The constant message to achieve more with less is being felt and there is a definite attrition of personnel. The higher education sector doesn't pay that well. There are other benefits but we don't pay that well. And it's such a good learning environment for that kind of field for cybersecurity and other areas that we tend to lose people because they just take that experience and get a nice well-paid job in the private sector."
Others in the industry can relate to the pressure placed on individuals due to understaffing.
"Often you haven't got much of a team," said Nick Ioannou, Information Security Manager at Goodlord. "It you're responsible for security and you fail, the business could go under so you can't switch off. Stuff comes in and I either deal with it now or it mounts. I haven't really gone on holiday and not checked stuff and logged in for a long time."
Part of this relates to the pivotal role of digitisation and how technology is perceived. When it works, it's a seamless invisible enabler of business. To a large extent it is the business. But tech's invisibility means that those working to provide it often also feel invisible. However, when something breaks, they become very visible, very quickly. Cybersecurity can feel particularly brutal because failure is built into the model, and the run up is spent with most people complaining that you're making them unproductive. CISOs are ultimately responsible for what they can't fully control, and most are only too aware that it's just a matter of time.
We need to talk about wellness in tech
As Mental Health Awareness Week draws to a close, we ask if and why tech has a problem with mental health, and what we can do to improve it.
On call 24 x 7
At the recent Computing Cybersecurity Festival, many of the people in attendance, when asked about how they managed a role which carried such a huge weight of responsibility had long ago accepted the fact that they could never have a true holiday from work.
"I take my laptop and my phone even when I'm going to Greece," said one Head of Infrastructure," because if something happens, I need to be ready. You always have that mindset that you need to be on call."
That "on call 24 x 7" mindset particularly afflicts people working in a field such as cybersecurity. Not only are they anticipating failure, they are also well versed in the consequences of it. This pressure to always be available can be impossible to resist - although many at the festival also acknowledged that it was, to a degree, sometimes self-imposed. One IT Director who didn't want to be named observed that:
"You know, there is an element which is that we've all got here because we're happy taking our laptops on holiday with us and staying until 8pm at night, and maybe that isn't good for our mental health. Maybe the industry has already weeded out the people that couldn't deal with that and overall, I'm not sure that's a good thing."
This individual raises an intriguing point - that the kind of people likely to favour the "work" part of the work-life balance are more inclined to be attracted to tech in the first place and to prosper there. That sense of feeling too important to take holidays and being a hero can feel pretty good in the short term. Certainly, other contributors to the conversation acknowledged a macho element in being able to tolerate this lifestyle, and indeed the impact on their partners. When viewed thought this prism, tech's lack of gender diversity makes a whole lot of sense.
The problem is that what feels good in the short term can be very damaging in the long run.
Jason Townsend acknowledged that he had taken stress leave in the last year. At first glance it looks shocking that individuals are ending up on stress leave, but the provision of stress leave by an employer can be viewed very positively.
"In higher education mental health is prioritised," said Townsend. "In the public sector there is some cushioning around leave and things like that so it's well supported."
Mental health stigma
Mental health charities and ambassadors have spent years trying to break down the stigmas around mental health. This involves having to chip away at the macho culture that still seems to prevail in certain sectors such as finance, law, big tech and the start-up world which seems to be almost purpose built to discourage people from reaching out for help. It's a culture personified by Elon Musk, encouraging "extreme hardcore mode," and extolling the virtues of sleeping at work.
Jill Hughes, Executive Lead and Sponsor of Mental Health at Accenture UK&I, comments on the challenge of persuading people to seek help.
"I think in some companies, it's still used a little bit as a sign of a lack of resilience," she says. "People are worried that they may not get the next promotion if they talk about it."
"We know that stigma around mental health in society at large. Probably only about 40% of people who are suffering actually reach out for help. In Accenture, we've done quite a lot to reduce that stigma so we find it's nearer 60% to 70% of people that reach out for help, but it is a worry that people may be suffering in silence."
Hughes makes an excellent point about the parallel with physical health.
"We don't think twice about somebody showing up to a meeting and telling us that they've just finished a good run because they've got a half marathon coming up. We often have water cooler chats about physical activity and physical health but the conversation rarely extends to mental wellbeing."
Part of the stigma associated with talking about mental health problems is rooted in other prejudices which present the macho stereotype of masculinity as normal and then punish anyone who deviates from it. How many men have been told to stop being such as "wuss?" How many Black women keep quiet because they fear being perceived as angry? Hughes thinks that part of the answer to overcoming what are deep-seated societal issues at a company level is to tailor the help available to employees.
"I spoke to a representative of a global mental health organisation recently and she gave the example of South Asian women and the way that they are more inclined to tackle mental health concerns which is very family focused and not seen as the kind of thing that you share in the workplace. I think we really need to understand different populations in our community and provide the right tools for the right people at the right time. One example of this that we do at Accenture is offering support for women who are going through the menopause using the Peppy platform."
We need to talk about wellness in tech
As Mental Health Awareness Week draws to a close, we ask if and why tech has a problem with mental health, and what we can do to improve it.
The cost of poor mental health
Why should employers care about the mental health of their employees? Other than it being morally the right thing to do, it can save them a lot of money. A report published by the mental health charity MIND in association with Deloitte, estimated that the costs to business of absenteeism, presenteeism and labour turnover have increased 25% since 2019, and now stand at somewhere between £43 and £46 billion in the private sector and £10 billion in the public sector.
The research found that for every £1 invested in mental health support such as screening, training and targeted interventions, an employer could expect a return on average of £5.30. This return could be increased further by doing what Jill Hughes advises and focusing support measures on certain groups such as those more likely to experience stress, anxiety and burnout such as those from minority ethnicities and those with caring responsibilities.
Other than the obvious way to improve the wellbeing of their employees by increasing their numbers, what can employers do to support their tech teams? Jill Hughes provides some examples:
"We have a 24/7 support line that our employees and their family members can use to access a range of support services such as counselling, financial advice, and legal advice. We get really fantastic results from surveys that we do about the effectiveness of that.
"In the UK we also have almost 3000 Mental Health Allies who are employees trained to talk about mental health openly, spot the signs of issues in their colleagues, and to point people in the direction of support services."
Hughes also mentioned cultural expectations in Accenture, saying the employees were encouraged to take regular breaks from email and not respond out of working hours. That may have elicited a mirthless laugh from some of the attendees at the cybersecurity festival although some did say that their employers were taking similar steps - especially when it came to meetings and remote working.
"In the early pandemic days people just got stuck having endless meetings and to counter that we have protected hours around midday where no meetings are allowed and you also can't book any after five o'clock," said one contributor.
Avoid token gestures
Limiting meetings and opening up access to counsellors and other avenues of support are useful, but companies should beware the token gesture. Being able to take your dog to work, attend a cat café, or access a minimally discounted subscription to a wellness app (all real-life examples given by people speaking confidentially at the cybersecurity festival) probably won't enhance the wellbeing of your employees. Likewise, unlimited holidays, chill out zones and fully stocked fridges in the shared kitchen don't alter the fact that, as one contributor put it, "your workload is your workload."
It's tempting to conclude that, in common with most other aspects of organisational and cultural changemaking there are no quick wins when you're trying to boost the wellness of your workforce. But actually there might be. One company had recently introduced a Teams status of "not feeling 100%" It's a useful way to signal that you're there, you're available but you're not quite at full steam and might not respond as quickly as you normally would.
There is also a feature in Google Workspace where meetings can be auto reduced by 10% to give participants an air gap between back-to-back virtual meetings.
It also takes very little time to actually listen to what employees are telling you. Perhaps the most important element in ensuring the wellbeing of staff who shoulder high stress levels is who they report into. As Simon Bowie-Britton, CTO at Trium Capital puts it:
"I've got a really good boss. He brought me in and then said, ‘I trust you to get on with it, but if you've got any issues come back to me.' And the issues aren't about technology they're about my time and that was really important. He was able to go back to the business and explain that we need to put a project on hold for six months. I was listened to and trusted."