Work-Life Unbalance
Stress is at an all-time high in the workplace and at home. It’s hard to leave your stress at the office when you bring your computer home or have email, Slack, and more on your phone. An article in Forbes on January 19 shared a study by the Korn Ferry Institute, revealing that workplace stress is even trending upwards. The Korn Ferry study cited that 76% of respondents said workplace stress had a negative impact on their personal relationships, 66% have lost sleep due to work-related stress, and 16% have quit jobs because the stress became too overwhelming.
I Can’t Truly Be Offline
There are many reasons for work-related stress, and although we can’t solve for all of them, we think we can surely help. At SolarWinds, we understand the pressures and responsibilities that go along with being an IT professional. When you’re out of the office for any reason—vacation, family commitments, watching your children at a school function, or just unwinding after a long day—you can’t just shut off your IT responsibilities. It doesn’t matter what your role is; you could be in IT support, an application owner, a software engineer, or a tech lead. IT incidents happen, and it happens to the applications you’re responsible for keeping up and running.
As much as we want to completely shut down when away from the office, it’s not practical. Right or wrong, today’s demanding IT environments include an expectation that you’ll be responsible 24/7—even if you’re part of a team that works in shifts. You need to know what’s going on, and how your applications are performing in real time.
So how can you maximize your out-of-office (OOO) time and still have confidence that the webpages you’re responsible for are functioning and supporting the business while you’re offline? Having a reliable web performance monitoring tool can help reduce some of the stress when you’re trying to stay out of the office and offline. Don’t get me wrong—when an outage occurs, it interrupts your OOO time, the adrenaline starts pumping, and your stress tends to rise. But there is a way to help manage it.
Web Performance Monitoring Has Your Back
You can minimize stress-inducing episodes by eliminating false alerts and the unnecessary work that comes along with them. When you do have a real issue, having the right information about what went wrong is important, so you can reduce the time you spend fixing it.
A web performance monitoring tool provides a variety of functions that keep you and the team informed if anything starts to go wrong. For example, SolarWinds® Pingdom® helps validate the alerts are real by checking twice across multiple probe servers before notifying you. It also provides enough information, including custom messaging, to enable you to decide if you need to take action and if you do, what action you should take.
You need to be sure your website, DNS, APIs, network, and critical transactions are up and running as designed. Pingdom can monitor page performance, the actual users’ experience, and simulate the key transactions supporting your business. By providing much more than uptime alerts, Pingdom is your 24/7 intelligent, web application watchdog that reaches out only when necessary. You can still be the person that’s responsible and accountable while minimizing how much time you spend online when you’re supposed to be offline. As a result, you have more time to spend with loved ones or just doing the things you love to do.
We at SolarWinds hope you’ve been enjoying your summer. IT professionals are the hardest working people and deserve to maximize their R&R while OOO.
