Current Research Project in Collaboration with Smart City Bamberg

ScanGov: Health in the Workplace

In this day and age there are many ways to record one's own activities, ranging from pedometers to the monitoring of bodily processes such as heart-rate and sleep. It is however little understood how the digitalisation of the workplace affects the health of employees.

Accordingly, we are conducting a study by accompanying employees throughout their workdays in order to learn more about day-to-day life at work. For this purpose, you will receive a smartwatch and a daily questionnaire pertaining to work and wellbeing.

Our goal with this combined study is to understand better the relationship between stressors and resources among Bamberg's workers, particularly with respect to digitalisation. We want to find out what form good work should take on.

For this purpose, we require the energetic support of office workers who are willing to provide information about their wellbeing in their everyday worklife in the form of several short online questionnaires.

What beneifts are there to participating in the study?

• For your participation in the study, you will receive individual feedback on the results of the questionnaires, as well as suggetions, tips and recommendations, and how these results can be interpreted and used. Hence you can profit from the scientifically grounded recommendations, specific to yourself, for the benefit of your health in day-to-day work.
• Perhaps you were always curious to try out a smartwatch. Now you have the opportunity to try one out!
• From May onwards there is the chance to use a heart-rate monitor and thus obtain more exact results. For that reason we can also provide a chest-strap, which you can wear for the afternoon in order to obtain additional information about the heart and stress levels.
• You can have the good feeling of knowing that your have supported us in our research in work psychology and thereby made a worthy contribution towards the attainment of new knowledge.

Was is it necessary to have in order to participate?

• You have a desk-job.
• You are an employee or manager in Bamberg.
• You are working at least thirty hours a week.
• You have a PC, smartphone or tablet on which you can complete the quesitonnaires.
• Sie own a smartphone (Android or iOS) with which the smartwatch can be used. If necessary, you can also obtain a smartphone from the project.

How exactly does the study work?

All in all, the investigation consists of an initial online questionnaire followed by three small, daily questionnaires, which should be answered every workday over the course of a week. That means that, over the course of 5 working-days, you will receive a morning, afternoon and evening questionnaire. The more often you answer, the more exact the feedback will be at the end of the study. (With this exact analysis you will receive sophisticated feedback about your health in the course of the period of questioning.)

Furthermore you will receive a smartwatch from us, which you would wear ideally over the entire period of the questionnaires, that is, every workday and in the evenings (excluding weekends). The smartwatch measures your heart-rate, various activity indicators (e.g. steps) and your sleep quality. The smartwatch is connected with a health application. The datapoints are particularly important, since you will be receiving feedback about your behaviour, which is combined with psychological data obtained from the questionnaires.

The questionnaire process will look like the following:

1. Firstly you will go to the registration page. There you will select a survey period for participation from among the several weeks available in early 2022 and summer 2022. You will need to provide an email address, so that we can remind you of your participation and send you links to the online questionnaires per email.
2. After you have registered, you will receive an invitation to answer the preliminary questionnaire. We would be grateful if you could give about 20 minutes of your time in order to answer the questions; it should be answered at the very latest on the day before the survey period.
   Beware: The preliminary questionnaire can only be completed at most a week before the beginning of survey period.
3. Then we will contact you to arrange an appointment to hand over and set up the smartwatch. This will happen at some point in the week before the survey period. We will explain how the smartwatch works and you will have the opportunity to ask us any questions about the investigation.
4. In the week-long survey period which you selected in the first step, you will receive an email every workday contining the three short daily quesionnaires. Please fill in the questionnaires in the stated timeframe, for afterwards the questionnaires will expire. Completion of each questionnaire takes around five minutes, with which you will help us a great deal in our research.

  The periods of time for the questionnaires:

• Morning questionnaire:              between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m.
• Afternoon questionnaire:           between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.
• Evening questionnaire:               between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m.

Following the completion of the survey period (the end of the last questionnaire) you will be able to request your individual feedback report.

This link (https://ww3.unipark.de/uc/gesunde_arbeit/?a=) or the QR-Code above will take you to the registration page.