Using email signature software to reduce IT stress
21 August 2023
Workplace stress is increasingly recognized as a serious issue. It’s important for employers of all sizes to recognize and address workplace stress, as the impacts can be life-changing for individuals and damaging for organizations.
However, even with an increased awareness of the causes and effects, research shows that IT professionals are more susceptible to it. In fact technology workers record feeling stressed on average 3.25 days a week, with 58% experiencing burnout at any one time.
The biggest stress sources for IT professionals
Stress comes from many angles for IT professionals. Some stressors are similar to other demanding roles, while others are specific to IT.
Excessive workloads
IT departments are often understaffed and overworked, which can have a detrimental effect on employees’ mental health and wellbeing. Skills gaps mean working across multiple disciplines, including in areas where they may lack experience or take longer than expected to complete tasks.
Rapid change
The technology industry is evolving at an extremely rapid rate. This pressures IT staff to continually adapt to new challenges and expectations as organizations emphasize harnessing digital technology to transform business operations, and increase efficiencies.
Repetitive and time-consuming tasks
The majority of IT time is focused on the same essential operational tasks. This leaves no time for applying new technology to solve problems, and innovating new IT services.
Pressure cooker events
IT departments are more likely than others to face events that threaten its ability to function, such as a cyber-attack or catastrophic IT failure. These occur without warning and provoke extreme scrutiny from management superiors.
Employee needs
With some exceptions, all employees of an organization are IT users. In effect, they’re ‘internal customers’ with expectations and requirements. The concept of internal customers is not unique to IT but no other business function has a 24/7/365 responsibility to provide a critical level of service and support.
The impacts of workplace stress
The impacts of workplace stress can be life-changing and even life-threatening, with high blood pressure, headaches, fatigue, and depression all being linked with it.
There are also significant impacts for organizations with high levels of workplace stress. These include decreased productivity, high employee turnover, and poor morale, all of which impact an organization’s ability to function effectively.
Why email signature management causes stress
Email signature management adds to the workload of already busy IT teams. Updates can be needed at unpredictable intervals and come with tight time constraints.
IT performs email signature management at the following times:
Employee onboarding. IT must establish an email signature when new employees start at an organization.
User changes. If personal data about an employee changes, their email signature needs to be updated to reflect this.
Marketing priorities. From time to time, the marketing department will require email signature updates to implement brand changes or to promote new campaigns via banners and images. Some of these changes may be planned in advance, while others will be more urgent.
Other business objectives. These could be changes to legal disclaimers, important communications, or adopting new functions like feedback buttons.
All of these contribute to workplace stress for IT, particularly when updates are unplanned with tight deadlines.
Email signature management’s manual overheads
Updating email signatures is a manual process, typically done via the account settings of an email system. This requires IT professionals to use advanced back-end settings in Office 365 (Microsoft 365), Google Workplace, and Microsoft Exchange for changes to take effect.
The manual nature of email signature management contributes to workplace stress for IT professionals, adding to a repetitive and excessive workload.
How email signature software reduces workplace stress
The answer to all these challenges is email signature software. This makes email signature management an automated process, thereby reducing workloads, mitigating time pressures, and giving IT teams precious time back to focus on other priorities.
Email signature software really comes into its own when scaled across an organization. It overcomes the complexity of managing email signatures by delivering:
Fast, accurate deployment of email signatures companywide. This is both automated and centralized, which is ideal for IT teams serving the needs of distributed workforces.
Total control over all email signature elements from contact details and social media icons, to email banners and legal disclaimers.
An easy drag and drop design process for creating professional email signatures.
The ability to define rules used to group employees into different departments and using Active Directory or Google Directory to complete contact details.
Share the workload, with the ability to assign access rights to colleagues. For example, you can allow marketing to change their own banners.
Summary
IT professionals are under great pressure, with an ever-growing skills gap, the need to stay up to date with the latest technology, and an expectation of round-the-clock service. This can lead to serious mental and physical health issues for IT workers that impact individuals and organizations at large.
Employers need to focus on creating a workplace environment that’s conducive to mental health and well-being, and take steps to ensure that IT professionals are properly supported, equipped, and empowered to do their jobs. And one way to do this is to invest in solutions that automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks: solutions like Exclaimer. IT professionals can then focus their attention on more strategic initiatives all while reducing a constant source of workplace stress.
See how thousands of IT professionals are reducing workplace stress with email signature software and get a free trial of Exclaimer today.
