Digital tools for a better work/life balance

Published on 02/03/2022 in Inspire

Reinforcing links with fellow workers remotely and, above all, striking a better work/life balance are two challenges facing employees working from home in which new tools can help, for example, in learning how to recognize peaks in stress.

Digital tools for a better work/life balance

Proximus continued to monitor its employees’ wellbeing very carefully during the coronavirus crisis. “Working from home had a positive effect”, says Sabine De Brauwer, prevention adviser for psychosocial aspects at Proximus. “We saw a positive development in general wellbeing.” However, remote working also led to new challenges. “People need informal contact, in order to strengthen links within a team as well as between teams.” Proximus anticipated this by offering team leaders extra support.

“That way team leaders learn to correctly assess what’s working well and what can be improved”, De Brauwer explained. “In turn they show their team that it’s good to air opinions, to say what’s OK but also what problems there are. It’s all about getting teams to work better together. Team leaders can help reinforce their team members’ resilience, and team members can learn to better appreciate each other’s work, even when everyone’s working remotely online. It should be possible to celebrate things like a successful project or someone’s birthday in a context of remote working as well.”

The right balance

At the same time working from home often proves a challenge in terms of work/life balance. “We’ve developed the ‘work smarter’ charter for that”, said De Brauwer. “When working from home, you’re advised to incorporate rituals to start and conclude your working day.” In practice, employees are often found to take on more work at home than they do at the office, for example by working on into the evening. In the long run this means you lose the balance. “We provide tips on how our staff should best organize their schedule and deal with tools when working from home.”

What’s more, Proximus is taking specific initiatives to further enhance the wellbeing of employees working from home. “Knowledge workers are often sitting still all day”, said De Brauwer. “We encourage our employees to move more.” That can be done by means of an app that prompts them to walk or cycle more, or thanks to the workout sessions that staff can follow on Proximus TV.

De Brauwer: “Through the ‘Feel Great in the New Now’ program, focus is placed on our employees’ resilience. In this respect we look at the job requirements on the one hand, and the resources employees have at their disposal, on the other. These can be related to the individual (degree of self-confidence, assertiveness, etc.) or work-related (degree of development opportunities and autonomy, feedback, etc.). That helps them find the right balance and avoid stress.

Digital tools help our employees when they’re working from home. They prompt them to move more, for example.

Sabine De Brauwer, prevention adviser for psychosocial aspects at Proximus

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Limits identified

One new tool with which Proximus has started up a pilot project is MoNoA, a wearable enabling targeted stress-level mapping and offering specific steps for stress reduction. “I’m the kind of employee who carries on working and would therefore surpass his own limits”, says Stijn Bogaerts, IoT Solution Manager at Proximus and founder of MoNoA. “I looked for a solution to make those limits visible.” A fitness tracker takes someone’s sporting activity as a starting-point. For work situations that approach didn’t appear the most suitable, so MoNoA takes the person himself as a point of departure.

The term MoNoA is derived from the Japanese ‘mono no aware’, an untranslatable expression referring to the transience of everything. “It’s about discovering where your limits are, when you’ve gone too far and when you have to recover,” Bogaerts explained. MoNoA works with a small wearable placed under your wristwatch.

The sensor measures the galvanic skin conductivity that offers the possibility of charting your stress pattern. “That’s just where the difficulty lies”, said Bogaerts. “People don’t know exactly when they’ve been under stress. They only feel the tiredness or headache afterwards.” Thanks to MoNoA we visualize how your body reacts to day-to-day situations. In this way you see what your body experiences as stressful or restful.

We often don’t know exactly when we’ve been under stress. We only feel the tiredness or headache afterwards.

Stijn Bogaerts, IoT Solution Manager at Proximus and founder of MoNoA

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Less stress

MoNoA identifies stress peaks, so the user knows the exact times at which those peaks occurred and, therefore, what activities or circumstances triggered them. The MoNoA ecosystem, with specialists in such fields as nutrition, sleep, movement and mindfulness, gives tips on reducing your level of stress. Bogaerts: “That, too, is something particular to each individual.

Someone might find restfulness in music; others in walking or watching TV.” The solution is individualized, but can also be helpful to a team. By aggregating the data relating to colleagues in a team, in anonymized fashion, you obtain a view of the whole group’s stress level.

“We’ve learnt a great deal from the pilot project with MoNoA”, said De Brauwer. “We want to further fine-tune the way the tool is used, in the context of the individual supervision of team members, for example.” The insight provided by MoNoA would make it possible to incorporate specific relaxation times, for example, in a targeted and timely manner, for particular profiles such as contact center staff. “It’s important that we integrate these kinds of tools effectively into our HR processes, based on the employees’ specific needs and in line with a specific strategy”, De Brauwer concluded.

Emotions identified

In another research project Proximus succeeded in measuring employees’ emotions in the context of a transformation process. “Previously, when you wanted to probe employees’ emotions, you had to organize a survey”, said De Brauwer. That exercise calls for a sizeable effort and only yields a result after some considerable delay. “We wanted to get an idea about emotion in real time.” For this, Proximus based itself on employees’ comments on news items on the intranet, obviously in such a way as to be in compliance with the provisions of privacy legislation.

Bogaerts: “That, too, is something particular to each individual. Someone might find restfulness in music; others in walking or watching TV.” The solution is individualized, but can also be helpful to a team. By aggregating the data relating to colleagues in a team, in anonymized fashion, you obtain a view of the whole group’s stress level.

“We planned measuring moments at various intervals throughout the transformation”, De Brauwer explained. “Then we unleashed Microsoft and IBM AI tools for textual analysis on these reports. At the same time, we checked with HR as to the prevailing emotions in a particular department.” The results proved to tally. “They indicate a trend reflecting what’s going on in a department, which helps HR to anticipate a specific situation in a more targeted fashion”, De Brauwer concluded.

Sabine De Brauwer studied psychology and educational sciences at Ghent University. Over the past 28 years she has developed her career at Proximus, the last five years as prevention adviser for psychosocial aspects.

Stijn Bogaerts studied to be a Technical-Commercial Consultant at the Province of Antwerp’s Arthesis Plantijn College of Higher Education and gained an executive Master in Business Administration at the Antwerp Management School (AMS). He is IoT Solution Manager at Proximus and founder of MoNoA.

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