work experience-of-workpressure

Managing work perception and workload in project organizations

To organize projects successfully, project management pays close attention to issues such as planning, budget, processes and resources. Nevertheless, many projects take longer than planned and budgets are often exceeded. An important (and often underestimated) factor in this is the well-being of the employees in project teams. When they work under great pressure for long periods of time, it can have a major impact on the quality of work and the success of a project.

By regularly measuring work perception and workload, you can detect work stress faster and take timely action. A lot of work? It doesn't have to be. We developed a handy solution that makes this easy, quick and effective to monitor. Solutions Consultant Jelte tells in this blog all about the 'Health App' that he helped develop.

From Excel to Power App

Jelte: "From a client in green energy, we were asked to come up with a solution for measuring their employees' work experience. The organization is project-driven and knows that at certain times this demands quite a lot from its people. So it is important to keep a close eye on their well-being and take action where necessary.'

Monthly questionnaire
'In addition to the periodic interviews, they therefore sent out a short monthly questionnaire to its employees. The aim was to gauge how capacity and workload were being experienced at that time. Simply via email after which the answers were put into an Excel list.'

Ditio Health App
'In itself simple and effective but a repetitive manual chore that takes time. They asked us whether this could not be done differently. We decided to develop a solution with Microsoft Power Apps: a 'Health App' that can easily be loaded into the existing Microsoft Teams environment and that is available on mobile devices.

Easily measure workload and work stress

'The app actually works quite simply and can be accessed through the browser, Teams desktop or Teams mobile. Every first day of the month an email is automatically sent to all employees asking if you want to fill out the app for that month.'

Only 2 questions
To keep the threshold as low as possible, only two questions were chosen. One about capacity/workload and one about work pressure/stress. With a slider you can select the answer that fits best. The answers are visually supported with an appropriate color: from green (things are going well) to red (things are not going well).'

health-app-homeHealth app question

Automatic reminder
'After the 2 questions, the employee can add their own explanation after which the form is sent. As long as an employee has not completed an answer for the current month, an automatic reminder will be sent weekly.'

Automatic management reporting

'Then all the data is automatically collected in a SharePoint list and made insightful for the Team Leads. The data can also be viewed in the App itself: as a Team Lead you have extra rights and therefore an extra button in the App. This allows you to view the data per department and you have a simple dashboard at your disposal with average scores per team. Of course there are different privacy levels that can be set. For more details it is also possible to open the Power Bi dashboard from the App, in which the data is visualized more extensively.'

health-app dashboardhealth app overview

Ensuring short- and long-term well-being

'Through the application of this App, our client's process is now fully automated. Team Leads can now even better assess whether and what actions need to be taken to ensure the well-being of their team both in the short and long term.'

Discovering trends in well-being
'The data from the App also provides insight into the long-term development, duration and course of well-being. This makes it easier to discover certain trends. Valuable information for the long-term management of (project) organizations.'

Ditio Office Application

'By now the 'Health App' is part of the Ditio Office Application and we also make it available to other companies. Of course, this can be set up completely as desired. There are also more possibilities within our Office Application to connect employees and teams. Think of Apps for registering attendance at events, booking workplaces and meeting rooms and more. We would be happy to tell you all about it!