Health and Sustainable Work

Why it matters in IT

IT jobs look safe: no heavy lifting, no dangerous machines. The risks are slower. Sitting still for hours, typing and using a mouse all day, looking at a screen at the same distance, being reachable in the evening, and carrying the stress of incidents and deadlines do little harm on one day and a lot over twenty years.

The numbers are not reassuring. In the Netherlands Working Conditions Survey (Nationale Enquête Arbeidsomstandigheden, NEA) of 2025, published by TNO and CBS in April 2026, 21% of employees reported burnout complaints, up from 19% in 2023 and 13% in 2015. The two sectors with the highest share were education and ICT, both at 25%. In Great Britain, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) counted 964,000 workers with work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2024/25 and 22.1 million working days lost; in its survey data, workload pressures such as tight deadlines are the main cause workers name, along with a lack of support from managers. A career in IT lasts decades, so the habits on this page are part of doing the job well, not extras.

Your workstation

Ergonomics is the study and practice of fitting work, tools and the workplace to the people who use them, rather than making people adapt to badly designed work. For screen work it means a desk, chair, screen and input devices set up so that you can work in a relaxed, neutral posture and change position easily. International standards cover this, such as the ISO 9241 series on the ergonomics of human-system interaction, often adopted as a national standard (in the Netherlands as NEN-EN-ISO 9241).

The details differ from person to person, but this checklist is a good start:

[ ] Chair height: feet flat on the floor, thighs roughly level
[ ] Back supported by the chair, especially the lower back
[ ] Desk height: forearms roughly horizontal, shoulders relaxed
[ ] Keyboard and mouse close, so elbows stay near the body
[ ] Screen straight in front of you, about an arm's length away
[ ] Top of the screen at or slightly below eye level
[ ] Daylight from the side, no window behind or in front of the screen
[ ] Text large enough to read without leaning forward
[ ] Laptop: separate keyboard and mouse, screen raised on a stand

Two monitors? Put the one you use most straight in front of you, or place both close together with the seam in front of you if you use them equally. Twisting your neck toward a side screen all day is a common cause of neck complaints.

Home and flexible workplaces

A laptop on the kitchen table is fine for an hour, not for a working week: the screen is too low or the keyboard too high, so your neck or shoulders take the strain. Your employer's responsibility for working conditions does not stop at the office door, and many employers provide or contribute to a chair, screen and keyboard for a home office. Ask what your employer offers before you buy it yourself.

Breaks and variation

Even a perfect chair does not help if you sit in it without moving for four hours. Your body is built for variation: changing posture, looking into the distance, standing up, walking.

A microbreak is a very short pause in screen work, from a few seconds to a minute or two: taking your hands off the keyboard, looking out of the window, stretching, standing up while you think. Microbreaks do not replace real breaks, but because they are short you can take many of them, and they interrupt the static posture that causes most complaints. Natural moments work best: stand up for every phone call, walk to a colleague instead of sending a chat message, refill your water glass after each ticket.

• Alternate tasks: plan screen-free work, such as a meeting in person, a walk to the server room or a whiteboard session, between long stretches at the screen.
• Use the time-boxing you already do: if you work in blocks (see Time Management and Prioritization), make the end of every block a reason to stand up.
• Take your lunch break away from the screen. Eating while reading tickets is not a break.
• Break software that reminds you to pause can help to build the habit; switch it to a gentle setting rather than ignoring it.

What the law says about screen work

Preventing RSI

Repetitive strain injury (RSI) is a collective name for complaints of the arm, neck and shoulders, such as pain, stiffness, tingling, numbness or loss of strength, that are linked to repeated movements, a fixed posture held for a long time, or both. In the Netherlands the term KANS (Klachten aan Arm, Nek en/of Schouders: complaints of the arm, neck and/or shoulders) is now often used instead, because the complaints are not always an injury in the strict sense. In the UK, the Health and Safety Executive speaks of upper limb disorders (ULDs); in the US, OSHA uses the broader term musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs).

Typical risk factors in IT work:

• many hours of typing and mouse use without pauses;
• a posture held for a long time, such as shoulders raised toward a keyboard that is too high, or a wrist bent while using a laptop touchpad;
• work pressure and stress, which make people skip breaks and tense their muscles without noticing;
• intensive gaming or phone use in the evening on top of a full working day.

Prevention is the combination of everything above: a workstation that fits, variation, microbreaks, keyboard shortcuts instead of constant mouse movement, and taking pressure seriously. Learning to type properly with ten fingers also helps, because you look at the screen instead of bending over the keyboard.

Stress and burnout

Some stress is part of IT work and can even feel good: a major incident solved, a migration finished on time. The problem is stress that does not end, so that you never fully recover between peaks.

Psychosocial workload

Psychosocial workload is the name for factors in the work situation that cause stress, such as aggression or violence, discrimination, bullying, sexual harassment and work pressure.

That framing matters. Excessive workload is a property of the work, and dealing with it is the employer's job. Saying "the on-call load is too high for this team" is a normal, legitimate work conversation, not a confession that you cannot cope.

Sources of pressure that are typical for IT:

• pages and alerts outside working hours, especially alerts that do not need a human (see Monitoring and Event Management on alert fatigue);
• major incidents with everyone watching (see Working Under Pressure);
• constant interruptions by chat, mail and tickets, which make people work faster but with more stress;
• the feeling that you must keep up with every new technology in your own time.

Burnout

Burnout is a state of deep exhaustion caused by long-lasting stress at work, in which rest no longer restores your energy. People describe emotional exhaustion, distance or cynicism toward their work, and feeling that they achieve less and less. The NEA measures burnout complaints as emotional exhaustion caused by work. A burnout does not develop in a week, and recovery often takes months, so the early signs matter most.

Signals to take seriously, in yourself or a colleague:

• still tired after a weekend or a holiday;
• sleeping badly, or lying awake thinking about tickets and incidents;
• irritation or cynicism about work you used to like ("it's all pointless anyway");
• forgetting things, making uncharacteristic mistakes, finding it hard to concentrate;
• physical complaints such as headaches or palpitations without a clear cause;
• withdrawing from colleagues, friends or hobbies.

None of these proves anything on its own, and only a doctor can assess what is going on. But several of them together, for weeks, is a reason to act.

What helps

• Talk early to your manager about workload, and to a doctor about complaints. In the Netherlands the company doctor is bound by medical confidentiality and does not share medical details with your employer.
• Make the work visible. A Kanban board with a work-in-progress limit (see Kanban) turns "I'm drowning" into a concrete list your manager can prioritize.
• Protect recovery: sleep, exercise, time with people outside work, and evenings without work notifications.
• Use the people around you. Many organizations have a confidential adviser (in the Netherlands a vertrouwenspersoon) for problems such as bullying or harassment.
• Look out for colleagues. "You seem tired lately, how are you doing?" is a kind question, not an intrusion.

Working hours, on-call and night work

Many IT jobs include on-call duty or shifts. How handovers and rotas work in practice is described in Handovers, Shift Work and On-Call; the legal limits depend on where you work.

Checking a night on call

Tomasz Nowak, a network engineer in Kestrel Energy's network operations center (NOC), works a day shift and is then on call until the next morning. It was a busy night. This program applies the two rules about call-out time (simplified: it only looks at the 24 hours from the start of his shift) to see whether he stayed within the 13-hour limit:

from datetime import datetime, timedelta

HALF_HOUR = timedelta(minutes=30)
LIMIT = timedelta(hours=13)


def at(text):
    return datetime.strptime(text, "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M")


def hm(delta):
    minutes = int(delta.total_seconds()) // 60
    return f"{minutes // 60}:{minutes % 60:02d}"


def call_out_blocks(call_outs):
    """Merge call-outs that start within 30 minutes of the previous one."""
    blocks = []
    for start, end in call_outs:
        start, end = at(start), at(end)
        if blocks and start - blocks[-1][1] <= HALF_HOUR:
            blocks[-1][1] = end  # the gap in between counts as work too
        else:
            blocks.append([start, end])
    return blocks


# Tomasz: day shift, then on call (consignatie) until 08:30 the next day
day_shift = timedelta(hours=8)  # 08:30-17:00 minus a 30-minute break
call_outs = [
    ("2026-10-06 19:40", "2026-10-06 19:50"),
    ("2026-10-06 20:05", "2026-10-06 20:45"),
    ("2026-10-06 23:30", "2026-10-07 00:55"),
    ("2026-10-07 03:10", "2026-10-07 03:20"),
]

total_call_out = timedelta()
for start, end in call_out_blocks(call_outs):
    counted = max(end - start, HALF_HOUR)  # at least half an hour per call-out
    total_call_out += counted
    print(f"Call-out {start:%H:%M}-{end:%H:%M} counts as {hm(counted)}")

worked = day_shift + total_call_out
print(f"Day shift {hm(day_shift)} + call-outs {hm(total_call_out)} = {hm(worked)}")
print(f"Limit {hm(LIMIT)} per 24 hours:", "OK" if worked <= LIMIT else "OVER")

Call-out 19:40-20:45 counts as 1:05
Call-out 23:30-00:55 counts as 1:25
Call-out 03:10-03:20 counts as 0:30
Day shift 8:00 + call-outs 3:00 = 11:00
Limit 13:00 per 24 hours: OK

The two calls at 19:40 and 20:05 became one block, because the second started within half an hour after the first had ended; the ten-minute call at 03:10 counts as half an hour. Tomasz stayed within the legal limit, but legal is not the same as rested: he was woken twice and starts again at 08:30. This is the moment to ask for a later start or swap the next day's tasks. Many cao's and company rules arrange exactly that, and a good team lead offers it without being asked. (Under UK rules the comparable check would be the 11 hours of daily rest; US federal law has no such limit.)

Night shifts

The right to disconnect

The right to disconnect is the principle that employees may be unreachable outside their working hours, and can ignore work calls, messages and email then without negative consequences, unless they are on call. In Dutch discussions it is called the recht op onbereikbaarheid. Some countries have written it into law; whether and how it applies to you depends on the country, your cao and your employer's policy.

Whatever the formal rules, these habits protect your time off:

• Separate on-call from off-duty clearly. When you are on call, the phone is on. When you are not, work notifications are off; the on-call colleague handles it.
• Do not answer "just one quick question" in the evening unless it is part of your duty. Every quick answer teaches people that you are always available.
• If you send messages outside working hours yourself, schedule them for the next morning, or say you do not expect a reply. As you get more senior, others follow your example.

A career-long view

Sustainable work is mostly about small things done every day, for years. A few that make a difference in IT:

• Fix the cause of out-of-hours work. Every page that did not need a human, every manual task that wakes someone up, is something to tune or automate. That is good engineering, and it is good for your health.
• Learn at a pace you can keep. You do not need to follow every new technology. A steady hour or two a week beats exhausting weekend sprints; see Learning Continuously.
• Move every day, ideally outside: a walk at lunchtime, cycling to work. It helps your back, your eyes and your mood.
• Use your days off. Leave that is never taken does not make you more valuable; it makes you more tired.
• Say it when it is too much, early and factually: "I've had four night call-outs this week and I'm making mistakes. Can someone take my on-call shift on Thursday?" That is a professional sentence, not a weak one.