The war plays non-stop at work

Workforce, April, 2003 by Caroline Louise Cole

As media executives are trumpeting technological success in bringing the war against Iraqi to computer desktops across America in real-time streaming video, employee assistance counselors are scrambling to help clients cope with the inevitable loss in productivity that comes when workers are glued to pictures of tank warfare, convoy attacks, and civilian casualties.

"When server traffic was spiking at news network's Internet sites, our phones were ringing off the hooks with employers and employees alike grappling with new levels of stress and anxiety," says Harry Sobel, a clinical psychologist who founded Sobel and Raciti Associates Inc., an employment counseling firm in Waltham, Massachusetts. "Any employer who thinks he's going to get 100 percent productivity from workers during such an unsettled period of geopolitical change isn't being realistic."

There's no question that live action shots of the war as it is progressing is contributing to greater levels of overall anxiety and workplace distraction, Sobel says. "While some amount of information is important for us to feel in control, the problem is when it becomes a 24-hour, non-stop obsession. Too much information ends up creating much more fear and anticipatory anxiety than we've seen in past conflicts and is ultimately contributing to a huge loss in Productivity."

Lisa Amore, director of consumer public relations in Seattle at RealNetworks Inc., acknowledges that her company's several streaming audio and video services--including its five-month-old RealOne SuperPass subscription service--have made keeping up with troop movements convenient and addictive. While RealNetworks doesn't publish its traffic figures, Amore says its servers experienced a five-fold increase in hits to its news sites--which include CNN, ABC News, the National Basketball Association, and Major League Baseball--the moment President Bush declared war and in the following week.

"The demand after President Bush declared war surprised even us," says Amore, who estimates that the company has about a million subscribers.

Joyce Gioia, the president of the Herman Group, a workforce counseling group in Greensboro, North Carolina, says that she is advising clients to allow their workers reasonable access to war news. "While there are some people who may become obsessed with getting every little detail, most employees will still focus most of their attention on work," Gioia says. "Some coaching and counseling may be advised for people who spend considerably more time following war news than getting their work done, but if you ignore workers' need to stay alert, people will likely find ways to keep informed that will require more time and energy."

Lewis A. Friedland, who studies Internet use as a journalism and mass communication professor at the University of Wisconsin, says what an employee does determines how much access to war news is reasonable.

"If you are a stock trader, then checking in on the war news every hour to see how it affects your trades makes you a better trader, but for a worker on an assembly line to use a work computer for news access would be abuse," he says. Regardless of the job, a humane workplace should allow workers, particularly those in repetitive assembly work, to have access to war news on their breaks, he says.