By James Rundle, Kim S. Nash and Catherine Stupp Aug. 4, 2020 5:30 am ET | WSJ Pro Long hours, remote work, a lurking pathogen and an onslaught of cyberattacks have security chiefs concerned that their staff are quietly absorbing too much stress at once.
Avoiding burnout is the hardest part of work in the pandemic, said Omar Khawaja, the chief information security officer at Pittsburgh-based nonprofit health care company Highmark Health. “I spend a lot of time with my team pleading with them, ‘Please tell me if anything’s wrong, where I can help’,” he said. “There’s nothing insurmountable, but if we don’t know about it that’s a guarantee nothing will be done.”
Managing the risk of burnout can sometimes require direct intervention. At Nasdaq Inc., CISO Lou Modano said the stock-exchange operator quickly realized there were pressures silently building in its workforce. Stress and burnout in cybersecurity haven’t been widely studied in a clinical manner, but anecdotal evidence suggests they can be serious. A report published by the London-based Chartered Institute of Information Security found more than half of the cybersecurity professionals it surveyed had either left a job due to overwork or burnout, or knew someone who had.With no commute, Mr. Khawaja said he lost the buffer between work and home life. His wife pointed it out the other night.