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In this blog, we talk about individual and structural factors that create stress for SREs and share 8 tips to improve SRE wellness.
When planning the SRE from home virtual even last month, one of the central themes was wellness and the need for self-care for SREs, especially during this time of crisis. Knowing how stressful an SRE’s day can be, combined that with a global pandemic and new working conditions, we knew we needed programming around SRE and IT wellness for SRE from Home. We’re all looking for ways to maintain a healthy work-life, but hearing this from your peers was especially important. The passionate response from the SRE community looking to speak on the topic was incredible. We hope that we were able to create a community of understanding around the importance of wellness.
The fact that most of us are working from home for an indefinite time period while dealing with external stresses that are out of our control, can cause new challenges and lead to undue stress. One of our SREfh presenters on wellness, Jaime Woo, co-founder of Incident Labs spoke about the stress that can result from working at home when he quoted a Casey Newton tweet, “We’re not working from home. We’re living at work.” We are having to work on similar tasks, but in a wildly different context while our brains play catch up, trying to build an understanding of “the new normal.”
The Global Wellness Institute (GWI) defines wellness as “the active pursuit of activities, choices and lifestyles that lead to a state of holistic health.” The key ideas behind it as a preventive and holistic pursuit can be traced all the way back to ancient civilizations worldwide. Today when we talk about wellness, it’s thought about mainly in terms of healthy living, self-care, self-help, fitness, nutrition and spiritual practices in the service of working towards an optimal state of wellbeing.
While we can practice wellness on an individual level, it is also necessary to acknowledge how much it is impacted by structural factors and the physical, social and cultural environments in which we live and work.
As a key part of the job, SREs must consistently provide a quick, ideally flawless, incident response and in a period when infrastructure is being pushed to the limits. While the industry has largely adopted a blame-free culture, that doesn’t prevent high stress and anxiety levels during and after major incidents. The range of how a mistake, whether self-inflicted or not, impacts team members can be minor to severe, particularly in a time of largely remote work where there is potential for isolation and less opportunity for frequent communication with coworkers and managers.
In The Catchpoint SRE Report 2020, 60% of respondents said they were dealing with work/life balance issues since working from home and 51% said this was impacting their focus and clarity levels. 37% said they were suffering from mental health, stress or emotional well-being issues while 41% said isolation was impacting them. When asked what issues were somewhat or extremely challenging, various issues emerged, from people feeling over-stressed with work to being asked to provide too frequent support during out-of-office hours.
What can SREs do to practice wellness? Here are 8 practical tips, which address both individual and structural factors that lead to SRE stress.
Check out the talks from SRE from home and join the continuing conversation in the event’s SRE Slack channels. The Slack community during the event was so supportive, we’re keeping it open for the foreseeable future. Hop on in and say hi to your fellow SREs!