The longer employers ignore their staff's exhaustion, the bigger a human resources problem they'll have on their hands Once upon a time, people associated IT pros with Jolt cola and the idea being that these folk were so enraptured by the music of the servers, they’d forgo basic human needs for the coding and troubleshooting activities they loved. Then the last decade rolled through, and the IT industry was hit by the recession. Now those IT pros may be relying on caffeine IVs not because they want to keep working, but because they have to.On Monday, Thornton May put it bluntly:Many of the IT people I meet are exhausted. Head count is decreasing, and workload is increasing. User expectations and regulatory requirements are expanding exponentially. A study analyzed the impact of multitasking and determined that most digitally aware people now work a 43 hours a day (that’s not a typo; it’s serious multitasking).[ Also on InfoWorld, a word of warning: Employers, prepare for IT worker exodus | Cut straight to the key news for technology development and IT management with our once-a-day summary of the top tech news. Subscribe to the InfoWorld Daily newsletter. ] Left out of his story: the mounting evidence that working long hours on the job can hurt or kill you. As Reuters reported, people working 10 or 11 hours per day are far more likely to develop coronary heart disease than those who hew to the charmingly old-school eight-hour workday. And no, the long hours weren’t linked to smoking, being overweight, or having high cholesterol. Instead, the article reported, “long hours may be associated with work-related stress, which interferes with metabolic processes, as well as ‘sickness presenteeism,’ whereby employees continue working when they are ill.”In addition to the physical threat that overwork presents, there’s the emotional one. A recent survey by Cornerstone OnDemand revealed that a majority of employees feel undervalued in the workplace — and their employers aren’t exactly knocking themselves out to boost morale. In fact, they’re slapping up to a quarter of their employees with new job responsibilities that are beyond the employees’ skill set. Unappreciated and overstressed is hardly a recipe for worker reinvigoration.Neither are layoffs — the Wall Street Journal reports that “people who work for employers that are hiring new workers tend to have a significantly more positive outlook on their lives than people who work for companies that are laying people off.” In other words, if the company’s ailing, the people who work for it are carrying that stress with them wherever they go. So what’s a company to do? May recommends that C-level executives begin looking at human energy as something to be managed as aggressively as any other utility, with an eye toward conserving the resource, not wasting it. Also, CIOs need to find a way to quantify the financial value the IT organization generates. Once the workers know what value they bring to the table, they’ll feel better.Still, there’s something to be said for taking some time off, or at least not working ridiculously long hours. How long until a news article or study reports dividends from that?This article, “Running on empty in the IT workplace,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. Careers