Keeping work stress levels at adequate values is essential to promote the interest and motivation of workers and also the company’s productivity. However, achieving this is not always easy, especially since measuring something intangible like stress is difficult.
Aware of this difficulty, researchers from Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM) have developed a simulation system that allows them to calculate the stress levels of workers in their jobs, analyze how this influences their behavior and, thus, design more appropriate policies.
“While a high level of stress can lead to anxiety or absenteeism from work, a low level can also have undesirable consequences, such as lack of motivation. Identifying and understanding all the elements that affect workers’ stress is a fundamental factor to improve their performance and well-being”, explains Sergio Muñoz, from the Intelligent Systems Group at Higher Technical School of Telecommunications Engineers of the UPM.
Workload, the most influential factor
The work, which was published in the Journal of Computational Science, was clear: above environmental conditions or relationships with other workers, the workload is the element that most influences workers’ stress levels.
To reach this conclusion, the UPM researchers proposed to define a stress model that took into account environmental and working conditions, to calculate anxiety at work together with worker productivity; Later, this model would be implemented in an agent-based simulation system, which is a computational model that allows simulating the actions and interactions of autonomous agents (individual or collective entities) to determine what effects they produce on the system as a whole.
The proposed system allows simulating an intelligent office to analyze the evolution of stress and worker productivity over time
Carlos Ángel Iglesias (UPM)
This simulation system allows you to analyze stress and productivity in the workplace for different policies for regulating anxiety at work.
The researchers analyzed four different stress regulation policies and finally validated the model; first through a sensitivity analysis and then applying it to a living laboratory.
“The proposed system allows the simulation of an intelligent office to analyze the evolution of stress and productivity of workers over time, and allows users to easily configure personalized adaptation policies”, says Carlos Ángel Iglesias, another of the researchers of the UPM participating in the work.
Improving environmental conditions is not enough
To find out which policies would be best suited to reduce workers’ stress levels to appropriate values, the researchers tested four types of action policies:
No automation (there is no adaptation or registration system to detect the status of workers or environmental parameters); adaptation of the environment (automation of the control of environmental conditions, temperature, humidity or noise) ensuring that they are close to the optimal values; workload adaptation (automation of workload-related tasks); and full adaptation (adaptation to environmental conditions and workload).
The adaptation of environmental conditions combined with the adaptation of the workload, achieves a 10% reduction in workers’ stress
The results obtained show that the adaptation of the environmental conditions is not effective in regulating the anxiety in the work place for itself, but that, combined with the adaptation of the workload, it achieves a decrease of 10% of the stress of the workers
“The sensitivity analysis performed on the model confirms this result, showing that, among all the variables, the workload condition is the one that most affects stress and productivity”, explains Muñoz.
The main value of the proposed model is to allow a company to identify the causes of the workers’ stress level and evaluate various regulatory policies
For the researchers, the main value of the proposed model is to allow a company to identify the causes of the workers’ stress level and to evaluate several regulatory policies, improving workers’ productivity and quality of life.
“Stress has become part of our daily lives, affecting affected people and their families, health systems, private and social insurance companies, employers, co-workers and society in general. The objective of the research is to help regulate and reduce stress at work among workers, as well as to facilitate the identification of its causes and factors”, they conclude.
References:
Sergio Muñoz, Carlos A. Iglesias. “An agent-based simulation system to analyze workplace stress regulation policies“. Journal of Computational Science, 2021.
