URBICSA has been one of the first companies in Spain to participate in this project, offering an application for workers to monitor and control the emotional exhaustion they may suffer during the working day.
To take care of the employee mental health, EMPOWER has designed a mobile application aimed at managing daily mood, reducing accumulated stress and treating the emotional risk they may suffer in times of crisis. The app offers a set of questionnaires to be able to analyze and understand emotional state, recommending practices as simple as taking a walk, or reading a book, to overcome the emotional issues that we might be experiencing.
These activities not only seek to treat mental health problems, but also try to make both workers and their immediate superiors understand what is happening to them, what the causes are and how they can treat their emotional discomfort, eliminating the stigma associated with mental illness.
In addition, this project is aimed at breaking down the barriers between workers in order to solve these crises as a group, so that the individual understands that it is normal to go through these moments of crisis and can talk about it with their colleagues and superiors in order to find the root of the problem and seek a solution together. Dorota Merecz-Kot, a collaborator of the EMPOWER project, seeks that both the worker and his superior eliminate barriers and can talk about their emotional situation.
Social psychological risk are situations or conditions that negatively affect our physical and emotional well-being in the work environment. Although a large part of the population is not aware of this problem, various studies have shown the correlation between discomfort at work and health problems such as: difficulty sleeping, increased blood pressure and even serious cardiovascular problems. The most influential work factors are overwork, lack of work-life balance, and lack of support from colleagues and superiors.
URBICSA workers involved in the project have experienced an emotional improvement in their day-to-day life in the company and throughout this project. Pilar Canales, a worker in the Technical Department of URBICSA, said: “People are very happy with the application, it helps them to focus on the problems they suffer, and the result is noticeable, you can see how the workers live their day to day calmer“. The usability of the app and the fact that it can be used at any time of day, inside or outside of work, is one of the success factors of this application, according to many of the people who have participated.
This project still has a long way to go, at EMPOWER they talk about the digital barrier between the worker who uses the application and the professionals who manage it by collecting the data is a crucial factor in which they are working to improve. Still with challenges to be solved, the project has obtained a grant in Australia and has signed a collaboration with the University of Cambridge, seeking to make applications like this ubiquitous in any work environment in the near future.
