Breakthroughs:
Stress is an important threat to an individual employee’s health as well as the health of the organization they work for. Notwithstanding increasing stress knowledge, employers and employees currently have little grip on stress, and often intervene too late. Based on structured interviews with stakeholders, DESTRESS envisions a paradigm shift from stress as a fragmented, individual problem towards a collaborative preventive approach where employees, employers, and occupational healthcare providers are empowered to strengthen organizational and individual resilience in a deliberative, context-adaptive process (societal breakthrough). DESTRESS capitalizes on recent scientific developments to establish valid, actionable, and protected stress signals that reflect the dynamic interplay between individuals and organizations in naturalistic environments (scientific breakthrough).
Aim:
Focusing on cluster question “How can we ensure that our labor force and labor-market organizations remain robust and resilient as they face the challenges of the 21st century?” in NWA-route ‘Towards Resilient Societies’, DESTRESS aims to strengthen individual and organizational resilience by enabling early collaborative dialogue between employer, occupational healthcare provider, and employee, based on timely and actionable stress signals.
Approach:
In an iterative approach with multidisciplinary researchers and all relevant stakeholders, DESTRESS takes a unique transdisciplinary perspective to establish (1) Conditions for use of monitoring and providing feedback on stress and resilience from a variety of perspectives (individual, organizational, and legal/ethical); (2) Dynamic and ecologically valid stress signals integrating individual and organizational stress and resilience markers; and (3) A scalable DESTRESS solution that is evaluated in proof-of-concept implementation in real-life settings and further developed into a sustainable implementation strategy.
Impact:
With all relevant stakeholders actively involved from the start, DESTRESS holds the promise that it will be possible to address escalating levels of stress at an early stage in a combined effort. Eventually, improving resilience allows individuals, organizations, and society as a whole to thrive.
