Over 25% of IT workforce highly stressed: Report

With the IT sector facing higher targets, workload and prolonged night shifts, around 25 per cent of the workforce is fighting stress in their daily lives, a report said.

Out of this 25 per cent, more than half of the professionals (63.45 per cent) comprise of the young employees with experience ranging from 0-4 years, revealed the MindMatch report by a research-backed innovative venture SCIKEY.

The report has been derived from the SCIKEY MindMatch algorithm, which mapped 10,117 professionals across all IT domains in the age group of 22 to 47 years.

Among the factors leading to stress, family issues is at the top with more than 79 per cent professionals mentioning it. It is followed by uneasy workplaces (72.99 per cent), electronic gadgets (63.64 per cent), health issues (52.04 per cent), commuting issues (47.69 per cent) and lack of motivation (32.46 per cent).

Among the professionals claiming to have family issues, 41.29 per cent find it difficult to tackle their personal problems, leading to stress, it added.

Since money is important to them, the chances of working extra hours at workplace with an aspiration to earn more money leading to less family time adds to family issues hence causing more stress, it added.

The report further said that people for whom money is important but having low self-drive, do not put enough effort required to earn and they carry their frustration to family leading to family issues.

The survey findings also revealed that 52.04 per cent of the stressed workforce claim to have health issues.

Even as 90.69 per cent make sincere efforts in the direction of maintaining a healthy mind and body but they fail to maintain efficient habits with only 13.38 per cent excelling with consistent health habits.

The concept of maintaining health seems to fade away with growing experience and expertise with only 0.73 per cent of industry veterans looking after themselves while compared to 41.31 per cent freshers.

The report revealed that of the 88.43 per cent stressed workforce who claim that they plan and organise tasks well only 7.54 per cent of these individuals possess high levels of execution and management skills.

"The ever-evolving IT industry and its rapid changes are leading to stress among employees. Organisations who manage this better by pro-actively understanding the mindset of their candidates, employees and taking concrete steps to align it to the job, team, will create highly successful and winning teams in this competitive environment," SCIKEY co-founder Shriram Viswanathan added.