France Telecom CFO blames email for staff
stress
NEW YORK - 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.
While France Telecom Chief Financial Officer Gervais Pellissier
did not directly blame suicides on around-the-clock email, he said
workers in all big companies are under more pressure in the age of
the BlackBerry.
"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 on
Thursday.
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.
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.
Research in Motion's popular BlackBerry has been dubbed
CrackBerry in the United States, where some users say they are
addicted to checking emails.
Pellissier said such practices may be taking a bigger toll on
workers than has been acknowledged by his company or others.
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."
"That is probably something we've not undertaken, not only at
France Telecom but, it's more a global society issue, the impact of
the new ways of working on personal behavior," Pellissier said.
He did not say how the balance could be addressed but noted that
his company was taking the suicides very seriously.
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.
Pellissier talked about stress caused by workers changing jobs,
skills and locations as France Telecom recreates itself as a
private company from a government agency. More than 15,000 of its
roughly 102,000 workers had big job changes in the last five years
as a result of the privatization, he said.
He said the company would have to do a lot in the coming weeks
to help resolve the suicide problem.
"It's a serious issue. We have to deal with it," he said.
--Reuters