Information Industry professionals participated in a study on transitions and stress in the information industry in July 2009. This study was conducted by Colleen MacDonald Wright, a PhD student in Counseling and Counselor Education at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. It was designed to measure the work-to-family and family-to-work transition, boundary flexibility, mindful attention awareness, and perceived stress of people that work in the Information Industry.
Aggregate survey results for wave 1 of this study are now available. The results suggest that mindfulness, work flexibility-willingness, average weekly work hours, and average weekly hours worked from home may be significantly related to workers perceived stress. The presence of children under age 18 in the household had an important indirect effect on perceived stress - it decreased mindfulness.
Further, the study states that work flexibility-willingness is distinct from flexible workplace policies and refers to the individual worker's willingness to transition out of the work domain in order to address family needs. Even when flexible workplace policies are in place, workers may be reluctant to take advantage of them for various reasons such as competitive concerns or a desire to escape family responsibilities in the relative freedom of the work environment (Hochschild, 1997). Still, the workers in this sample reported significantly more work flexibility-willingness than family flexibility-willingness.
The study further notes that despite the increasing prevalence of integrated work styles, in which work tasks are completed at home and vice versa, it may be that the work and family domains are still distinct enough to attribute stress only to work done in the 'work' domain. It could also be that those who do some of their work from home have greater autonomy than other workers, and thus less perceived stress.
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