Employee stress and wellbeing:

Challenges

Due to the recommended lockdown, the company encouraged employees to work from home whenever possible. However, employees in some functions were still stuck at the office. For the change to go as smoothly as possible under the circumstances, the HR team needed a solution to receive daily feedback about employee wellbeing and to support it with objective data. The process of collecting and processing data needed to be performed without active involvement of the HR team, as they must spend their resources on delivering the targeted actions to improve employee morale & well being.

Approach and Outcomes

With the help of burnout detection, managers and HR specialists can understand the real state of employees, manage the emotional state of the team, and prevent unwanted attrition. Because burnout detection is based on the digital footprint of an employee, the data is objective. Ultimately, the company chose Yva.ai according to these reasons from their internal selection team: 

1. Yva was the only solution that could deploy in one business day; generate results in five
2. Yva was the only solution that could generate its models without violating internal and external privacy policies
3. Yva’s predictive analysis does not require human input or manual interpretation.

Stress monitoring and preventing burnout

The main objective of the HR team was to keep a close eye on the newly remote workers, who may struggle to adjust to the unfamiliar working conditions, and monitor the wellbeing of the office workers that had to keep on working from the physical office space. To get a more granular understanding of the situation, the team decided to monitor stress levels for four distinct cohorts of office workers: 

1. Previous Office workers that are happy to still be at the office
2. Previous Office workers that remain in the office, but wished they were home 
3. Previous Office workers that were forced to work from home due to virus 
4. Previous Office workers that wanted to work from home (and the virus granted them that permission)

The team used Yva.ai pulse-surveys to assign employees to one of the four cohorts. The hypothesis was that not all workers, whose work conditions changed, would feel equally stressed and that the HR team could scale its resources helping only those employees who actually need support. 

Data visualization for fours cohorts of office workers: 

Red dashed line: office workers that remain in the office but wished they were home

Red solid line: home workers that were forced to work from home due to virus

Blue dashed line: office workers that are happy to stay at the office

Blue solid line: home workers that are happy to work from home

Two groups of workers showed a sharp increase in stress level after the virus-imposed change in their work conditions: those who had to stay at home and wished they could work from office and those who were still in the office but wished they were at home instead. Stress level of employees who were content to stay at home actually dropped. 

Example of an employee burnout graph in Yva.ai user interface 

Targeted policies to address the stress

As it became clear that the rising level of stress was due to the alignment between employees desired working conditions, the HR team was able to work with the two most affected cohorts. Arrangements were made to reduce office time for those who preferred to work from home to a minimum. The HR specialists had a talk with each of the new remote workers who’d rather be at the office to find ways to facilitate the transition. For example, some employees didn’t have an adequate work space or couldn’t concentrate on work with small children staying at home with them. 

By learning who the most stressed employees were, HR saved time by using targeted actions to nip the problem in a bud. It helped the company increase employee morale, maintain engagement and stabilize productivity. 

The action plan

1. Engineering & Product leaders noticed a major dip in productivity; started collaborating with HR to identify the issue.
2. SCRUM masters pointed to “the osmosis of learning through the office” (this turned out not to be the issue)
3. Yva.ai deployed to measure productivity & engagement
4. With Yva distinct measures, previous office workers were identified as most affected, but only a subset (~38% were affected)
5. Conducted interviews of affected populations, saving time and false signals of interviewing non-affected cohorts.
6. #1 theme emerged was “creating focus from my family distractions”
7. HR came up with an office furniture & tools campaign, negotiating & deploying the solution in just 3 days.
8. This resulted in new noise cancelling headsets for some, office desks for others, and upgrades in home internet to separate family video streaming from office wifi.
9. Company spent ~$348.50 per employee affected.