CFO of France Telecom blames email for staff stress, suicides
A top executive at France’s biggest telecommunications company, which is dealing with a spate of suicides, warned that the barrage of emails from smartphones and personal computers was stressing out employees…
“Today for people working in business, whatever the level, whether they are CEO or even first- or second-rank level employees, they are always connected,” he told Reuters in an interview.
France Telecom, which operates under the Orange brand, has come under public scrutiny after 22 workers committed suicide and another 13 attempted to kill themselves since the start of 2008.
Gervais Pellissier said some employees were clearly feeling a lot of pressure due to the privatization of France Telecom, but he added that this was compounded by new technologies that cause work to encroach increasingly on personal lives.
“When you were an average employee in a big corporation 15 years ago, you had no mobile phone or no PC at home. When you were back home, work was out,” he said…
As a result a fragile employee with difficulties would probably have more confusion with “more mixture between personal life and professional life than in the past…”
France Telecom Chief Executive Didier Lombard said earlier this month the company was adding surveillance and counseling services as the pace of suicides among employees had picked up. One man had stabbed himself in the stomach during a staff meeting while a woman threw herself out a window.
Har! Does this dimwit even download his own email?
“It’s a serious issue. We have to deal with it,” he said.
The only reason senior management of a corporation would even care if a large number of their employees were committing suicide is if the suicides were impacting on The Bottom Line and hence, share prices and executive bonuses.
It’s interesting they’re NOT considering getting rid of – or even cutting back on – the overwhelming demands delivered by modern telecommunications. They’re only interested in surveillance and counselling, presumably so they can fire the ‘problem workers’ before they get around to killing themselves.
Dealing with the actual problem isn’t even under consideration because the solution might cost a lot of money in executive bonuses.
Scumbags!
Cinaedh
September 25, 2009 at 7:44 am