Health and safety in the workplace are part of the EU policy on employment and social affairs, under the Rights at Work directives. However, in spite of the large sums spent on risk prevention, there are certain areas where results are still limited. That is the case of work-related stress, which is dangerous and expensive as it affects performance, leads to frequent absences and, if prolonged, may result in serious health problems, such as cardiovascular or musculoskeletal diseases. Furthermore, with the advance towards the ubiquitous use of digital technology at work, new psychosocial risk factors and health hazards emerged, namely difficulty to focus, cognitive losses, deficits in social skills, sense of isolation, etc. The negative impact on productivity represents a major hidden cost in many organisations but especially in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Unlike larger enterprises, which have dedicated human resource specialists and welfare offices, managers in SMEs have few, if any, resources and no access to experts. Developing Competences for Stress Resilience @SMEs (DeSTRESS) aims to provide an innovative VET-based solution to this problem. Building on existing research, partners will develop a VET curriculum supported by an innovative VET Digital Training Platform using the latest techniques in game-based training and gamification, complemented by a set of practical tools and resources to facilitate the transfer of learning into the workplace. This environment will expose the main psycho-social health risks and their real impact on the individuals’ life and on the companies’ productivity. Players will assume roles, enabling them to think back on their experiences with these specific situations and how it happened, and which solutions are available for each scenario. Besides raising awareness on the problem, the project outputs will enable owner, managers and even decision makers to plan for and to mitigate its occurrence and the negative consequences of work-based stress. For that purpose, both a policy report and recommendations will be produced. A network of facilitators will also be created as an open forum to debate these issues. As such, the project will contribute to strengthening key digital competences while preventing the inherent hazards. Therefore, the project targets mainly employees, managers and owners of SMEs and micro companies. About 250 will be directly involved through the multiplier events and another 250 will be involved through direct contacts and other project activities like the network of facilitators. This network will also include about 100 HR consultants, health experts and decision makers leading to about 600 stakeholders directly involved in the project. Through a vast set of dissemination and exploitation activities, the consortium expects to reach 5000 stakeholders (from all the identified target groups). The project follows the Key Action priorities by using ICT based methodologies, fostering more modern, dynamic, committed and professional environments inside the organisations, increasing the level of digital competence of the involved participants and increasing motivation and satisfaction in the daily work life. It will create open and innovative practices, in a digital era, developing learning materials and tools that support the effective use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in training. As a result of DeSTRESS, SMEs will benefit from improved staff productivity and will be better placed on the Digital Transformation whilst mitigating many of the negative consequences associated with it. The project will also contribute to improving the competitiveness of European SMEs enabling them to compete more effectively with larger, better resourced and digitally competent enterprises both in Europe and globally.
The DeSTRESS project aimed to create and dissiminate a training platform and gamified tools to develop digital skills and, at the same time, raise awareness about the potential risks and health hazards related with the use of Digital Tools in the work environment, namely technostress and stressors. The project also aimed to motivate the involved stakeholders to adopt the required measures to prevent those risks. To make a complete specification for these tools, partners built on existing research to identify the required set of critical technostressors and competences, which led to the development of a VET curriculum and an innovative VET Digital Digital Training Platform using the latest techniques in game-based training complemented by a set of practical tools and resources to facilitate the transfer of learning into the workplace. This e-environment exposed the participants to the main technostressors and to different strategies to manage those stressors. Finally, besides raising awareness, the project aimed to enable owners, managers and decision makers to plan for and to mitigate the occurrence and the negative consequences of work-based stress. For that purpose, a policy report and respective recommendations were produced.
The Strategic Framework on Health & Safety at Work 2014-2020 underlined the importance of preventing work-related diseases and health hazards by tackling new and emerging risks as it the case of technostress. An analysis of the implementation of the OSH directives clearly concluded that compliance is more challenging for SMEs and especially with regards to psychosocial risks. Several authors - including our own past project Participative Prevention of Psychosocial Emergent Risks in SMEs (Silva et al., 2015) - have emphasised that SMEs face specific challenges, have a lack of awareness and that the lack of resources (financial or human resources) constitute obstacles for their involvement in health prevention. These companies need tools that are easy to use, accessible and without costs (e.g., Martin & LaMontagne, 2018; Silva et al., 2015). Specific support measures are necessary to reach SMEs and help them increase their compliance in an efficient and effective way. The DeSTRESS project aimed to raise awareness for technostress management; offer free resources to enable owners, managers and decision makers to plan for and to mitigate the technostress occurrence in SMEs.