Human Energy Diary Studies with Personalized Feedback: A Proof of Concept with formr

While the current pandemic amplifies the trend of highly self-responsible and flexible work, many employees still struggle addressing the resulting self-management challenges like balancing strain and recovery. Maintaining health of employees is a major concern of organizations to remain competitive, but in the context of highly individual work, this can hardly be supported with classical occupational health initiatives. Thus, it is crucial to develop tools that provide individuals with personal insights on their everyday work and help them determine applicable health behaviors. Towards this goal, we report on our design and implementation of diary studies with personalized feedback about persons’ energetic wellbeing. Whereas such studies enable to research phenomena at the collective level, they can additionally act as intervention at the individual level. This is especially relevant to 1) provide a motivational incentive for continued participation and 2) raise awareness about recent topics in occupational health and promote healthy behaviors, while advancing research concerns. We provide insights from several studies regarding the generated feedback, the perception of the participants and IT-related improvement potentials. Hopefully, this will inspire further research that takes advantage of the win-win situation conducting studies, which simultaneously provide participants with individual insights.