Many in the workforce experience stressors on the job, and the Covid pandemic only makes things more challenging. Whether it’s educators navigating new remote instruction challenges, parents figuring out how to balance work and their kids’ school and care, or a medical practitioner who sees patients at the office – we all face stressful work tasks in one form or another. How do we help the people in the work force and guard their mental health and well-being? How are a worker’s productivity and wellbeing impacted by stressful tasks, and how can that be addressed?
Various methods exist to measure people’s resilience in the face of stress. We can better determine how to bolster resilience by understanding how different wellness mechanisms interact with work environment stressors. Companies and organizations often support wellbeing through wellness resources, but which tools and interventions boost resilience and help mitigate the impacts of stress, how should they be applied, and when? Some organizations would benefit from having better ways to detect sources of stress sooner, and more specifically, finding ways in which employees are experiencing heightened stress and by having more specific, tailored ways that they can help mitigate stress before it has much chance to build. The project will test the mitigating effects of both known and novel mechanisms on the impact of exposure to certain simulated stressful work tasks.