Forenet: A Context-sensitive Tool To Measure Social Wellbeing At The Workplace

Abstract

Social wellbeing at work by definition incorporates the feeling of belongingness, having satisfying social interactions and relationships with others (Fisher, 2014). During the COVID-19 pandemic, working from home has raised our awareness that positive social interaction with colleagues or peers is crucial to our wellbeing and the lack of it might lead to negative effects like exhaustion (Meyer et al., 2021). It has been researched that positive social wellbeing at the workplace can boost mood, increase productivity and performance (Dutton and Heaphy, 2003). Thus there is a need to measure and monitor the social wellbeing of employees at work for organisations like TU Delft. Supervised by Annemiek van Boeijen and initiated by Susanne Colenberg, this project aims to develop a tool that measures social wellbeing at the workplace. Recognizing the fact that the tool design could face challenges including different contextual influences and diverse needs and values of stakeholders, a design challenge was formulated to design a context-sensitive tool that can enable adaptation to different local contexts in order to meet different needs. The focus was put on the measurement form design instead of the content like what to measure. To tackle the challenge, this project followed a design process using the model of Double Diamond(Design Council, 2019) and Basic Design Circle (van Boeijen et al., 2020). To explore, methods of literature study and participatory research were combined to understand existing measurement tools and investigate stakeholders’ experiences. By synthesizing insights from the research, main problems were identified and a design vision was formulated. To inform the concept development, a list of design requirements were developed based on the theoretical architecture of the approach, Context Variation by Design (Kersten, 2020). Guided by the design vision and the design requirement, concept development was conducted starting by defining a basic framework of a continuous system. During the development, two rounds of ideation were executed both with reflections and idea convergence in the end. With the first ideation, possibilities were explored and a design direction was selected. The second ideation was used to design a more concrete concept that aimed to create a supportive network. With the clear concept, a final design was created and introduced, the app Forenet. With the app, employees could help improve social wellbeing at the workplace by sharing anonymous opinions. HR officers can use this app to customize how employees provide those opinion data and collect and track data about their social wellbeing over time. The final prototype was developed through Figma and stimulated into animation for design evaluation. With evaluations with employees and HR officers, what could be opportunities, challenges and drivers for its implementation were identified. Strategies to implement the design at TU delft context and a using manual for HR officers were proposed. In the end, recommendations for future development were also suggested.