Keywords

1 Introduction

Job stress has been regarded as one of the important issues at the workplace. Hoboubi et al. [1] proposed that job satisfaction and job stress are important factors that affect workforce productivity [1]. In Korea, adults who have a job spend at least 9 h at their workplace. This indicates that social, psychological and physical factors on the job may have a strong influence on employees’ health. Caplan et al. [2] stated that stress refers to “any characteristics of the job environment which pose a threat to the individual.” [2] Margolis and Kroes [3] suggested that job stress is a condition at work which interacts with worker characteristics to negatively influence psychological or physiological homeostasis [3]. Margolis and Kroes [3] proposed that there are five dimensions of job related strain: short-term subjective state (e.g., anxiety, tension, and anger), long-term and more chronic psychological responses (e.g., depression, general malaise, and alienation), transient physiological changes (e.g., levels of catecholamine, blood pressure, etc.), physical health (e.g., gastro-intestinal disorder, coronary heart disease, and asthmatic attacks), and work performance decrement [3]. Employees’ job stress not only influences their minds but also leads to poor work performance by adversely affecting an employee’s motivation. According to Beehr and Newman [4], job stress can be divided into six facets of the working context: environmental, personal, process, human consequences, organisational consequences, and time [4]. Similar to Beehr and Neman‘s [4] study, this research has been initiated with the assumption that employees experience stress which is similar to the stress acquired at their workplace. In addition, similar types of stress at workplace may be caused from meeting the same persons, same contents of meetings, same location or same timings. This means that employees should perform regular work and contact other persons regularly. That is the main reason why we focused on the concept of stress at the workplace. We hypothesised that people receive similar types of stress from the similar job events. In addition, we also hypothesised that recording the level of feeling regarding each event is helpful in tracking the past emotion corresponding to each event. Additionally, people can be careful to avoid the unpleasantness related to a specific event by recording the levels of their feelings that correspond to such events.

The purpose of this project is to arrive at a new type of solution to reduce job-related stress at the workplace. We developed a new type of calendar which allows the employees to record their feelings concerning each event in their schedule. The contribution of this project is to provide a stress calendar system to avoid stress by recording work-related stress. Additionally, the system will be evaluated to analyse whether using the system is helpful to effectively reduce stress or not.

1.1 My Stress Calendar

We conducted an online survey to find out how to reduce stress at the workplace where similar events happen. Based on a survey of 156 participants, it was found that 77.5% of participants normally experienced various types of stress caused by heavy workload or duties which were too difficult to complete. Thus, we designed a web- based calendar system called “My Stress Calendar” which provides various functions, such as subjectively recording stressful events, relevant memos, and emotions (Fig. 1). Furthermore, the system provides an emotional feedback depending on the stress index entered by the users.

Fig. 1.
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My Stress Calendar sample image

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Figure 2 describes the user interface of the My Stress Calendar system. In general, its basic function is similar to a normal calendar application. It shows dates in a monthly view. The user can input his/her events into the schedule. After the event, the user can edit the schedule to add one’s emotional feelings about the event. The user can choose one of five stress levels (−2, −1, 0, 1, 2). Negative scores mean negative feelings about the event, such as frustration and anger. Positive scores mean positive feelings about the event, such as satisfaction and happiness. Zero means that the user felt neither positive nor negative feeling about the event. Thus, the user can track one’s feeling about a past event.

Fig. 2.
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The user interface

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2 Related Works

Tomitsch et al. [5] stated that calendars have been regarded as a personal supportive artefact for a long time [5]. They conducted a research to find out the types of emotional values that occur when using a personal calendar. Tomitsch et al. [5] suggested that a calendar can play a variety of roles, as a temporal map, an emotional awareness artefact, a personal information management tool, a handheld tool and a diary [5]. Their study proposed that calendars have an emotional value for their users, recording states of relations and emotional expressions like diaries. Thus, a calendar is used not only to manage a schedule, to do list, and information but is also used to share emotional events with family or friends. By using a calendar as an emotional tool, the users can record their emotional expression on the schedule and remember it. Our study focuses on recording the level of stress corresponding to a schedule. Such a recording activity is regarded as a way of expressing emotion related to a schedule. Expressing emotion about the schedule may help people address similar events because they can remember why they experience a particular emotion that corresponds to an event in the schedule.

3 Methods

3.1 Experimental Design

Twenty subjects were recruited to evaluate the “My Stress Calendar” system. The independent variable for the experiment comprised using “My Stress Calendar”. The “My Stress Calendar” was used by the subjects to evaluate the efficacy of this calendar system in reducing stress at the workplace. The dependent variable is the score of perceived stress scale [6]. Thus, before using the “My Stress Calendar”, the participants were asked to record their stress level according to the perceived stress scale. There are seven positive and seven negative questions. Negative questions were used to find out the level of stress the participants perceived regarding an event. Positive questions were used to find out the level of positive feeling the participants experienced when they effectively dealt with a challenging event. The scale consists of five points; from 0 to 4. 0 is never, 1 is almost never, 2 is sometimes, 3 is fairly often and 4 is very often. The participants used the “My Stress Calendar” for three days. When using the “My Stress Calendar”, they were asked to fill up their schedule on the “My Stress Calendar” and were also asked to record their feeling about the schedule. After that, they were asked to express their stress level according to perceived stress scale. Figure 3 illustrates the research process in detail.

Fig. 3.
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Research design

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3.2 Apparatus

A desktop computer which consists of an Intel core™ i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40 GHz and 16.0 GB of RAM was used. The monitor’s resolution was 1920 × 1080. Windows 10 Enterprise was installed on the desktop computer and Microsoft explorer 11.0 was used to access the “My Stress Calendar” on the Web. The “My Stress Calendar” prototype, which is a web-based system, has been developed using PHP as a server-side script language running on an Apache Web Server; this application serves various dynamic web pages and works on a MySQL database. On the client-side, Javascript (pure Javascript, JQuery) was used to build various static functions and visual interfaces. Statistical analysis was conducted using Microsoft Excel 2010.

4 Results

Table 1 gives basic information about the subjects (participants). The mean age was 30.85; gender wise, there were 13 men and 7 women participants. Amongst the participants, 9 were designers and 12 were developers.

Table 1. Basic information
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According to Table 2, the mean value of perceived stress score from the survey before using the “My Stress Calendar” was 26.85. However, the mean value of perceived stress score obtained after using the “My Stress Calendar” was 22.80. This indicates that the participants’ stress levels decreased after using the “My Stress Calendar.” The result of the one-way ANOVA indicates that there was a significant difference between before using “My Stress Calendar” and after using “My Stress Calendar” on the perceived stress score; the F-value was 4.12 and the P-value 0.04 (Table 3).

Table 2. Summary of ANOVA: single factor
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Table 3. Result of ANOVA: single factor
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5 Discussion

It can be assumed that the subjects experienced less stress at their workplace after using the “My Stress Calendar”. There was a significant difference observed in the stress levels based on whether or not individuals used the “My Stress Calendar”; however, the difference was not significant as expected. To explain this result, several reasons have been identified and discussed in this section. Firstly, the users could not use the “My Stress Calendar” for a sufficiently long period. This project was carried out over three weeks, which included the development time for the “My Stress Calendar” web-based system. Thus, the subjects were given only two days to use the system due to limited project time. If more time had been given to the subjects, the difference would be considerable. Secondly, even though more emotional functions were designed, these could not be developed due to limited project time. We initially designed the system according to the comfort level of the users, depending on their feeling about the schedule. However, we could not develop “Comfort” functions; the system was only developed to the record the feelings about the events. Thirdly, if the subject felt bad suddenly from an unexpected event, then his/her stress score measurement may have influenced the result, without reference to using the system.

In order to find out how the subjects were influenced emotionally by recording their feeling about an event, we need qualitative data through in-depth interviews. In future, we will develop more system functions such as “Comfort”; then we will conduct an in-depth interview to find out how the subjects’ feelings may change by recording one’s feelings about the events. It is necessary to clarify the change of subject’s behaviours or feelings through qualitative data. This means that recording the stress level corresponding to each event may lead to cognitive behavioural change, such as avoiding the stressful event recorded in the system. In addition, the system may comfort the users when he/she records many stressful events. This indicates that the feelings of the users may change whereby their mental health improves. According to Beck [7], emotions, thoughts and behaviours are all connected and influence each other [7]. Hence, it can be assumed that the future study will investigate the relationship between recording stressful events, the change of behaviours, and the change of feelings.

6 Conclusion

We developed the “My Stress Calendar” which is a web-based system to record users’ feelings about their schedule. Twenty subjects were recruited and their stress score were measured based on a perceived stress scale. The results indicated that there was a significant difference in stress score between before using “My Stress Calendar” and after using “My Stress Calendar.” It turns out that recording how one feels about an event may be an effective behaviour to control one’s feelings and improve one’s mental health. However, this project has some limitations due to limited resources. In future study, we need to focus more on how human emotions, thoughts, and behaviours influence each other by recording feelings about events in one’s every day live.