StressOut: A new European project to help recognize, manage and prevent work-related stress and burnout

Modern Tools for Work-Related Stress Management or StressOut in short, is a two and a half years project funded by the Erasmus+ program of the EU.

The StressOut project comes in answer to an ever-increasing need to help combat an issue common not only to the participating partner countries, but also to all of the EU and societies anywhere in general i.e. work-related stress.

The issue of work-related stress and burnout is connected to a complicated pool of reasons and consequences. Focusing on psychosocial risks and reducing stress at the workplace is one of the goals within the „EU strategic framework on health and safety at work 2021-2027 Occupational safety and health“, according to which mental health problems affected 84 million people in the EU already before the COVID-19 pandemic. The framework states that “evidence suggests that tackling hazards to psychosocial wellbeing requires a process with different stages implying changes in the work environment”, while “half of EU workers consider stress to be common in their workplace, and stress contributes to around half of all lost working days” and “nearly 80% of managers are concerned about work-related stress”.

Therefore, the StressOut project will apply a holistic approach by building a comprehensive digital training course, aiming to transfer some very specific skills and competences to its end users, via effective stress management techniques like neurographica, mindfulness, emotional intelligence, nutrition, meditation, work-life balance on one hand, but also a number of valuable skills equally important on both personal and professional level like problem solving, time-management, motivation, effective communication and collaboration, which are all recognized as key competences for lifelong learning and have become part of relevant major EU frameworks such as DigComp.

The project is set to achieve this through the following key activities:

The StressOut training course is the main activity of the project meant to build innovative training course with experiential training activities to enable both employers and employees to combat work-related stress and burnout, as well as working techniques on how to prevent them via an easily accessible and modern tool.

A stress-assessment tool will help the end-users to properly change their work environments and even work habits, and thus becoming more resilient in stress prevention on both a personal and organisational level.

The StressOut Mobile App is a free, easily accessible cross-platform tool right in the “pocket” of potentially any person, allowing an enormous chance of outreach and impact. The app will integrate the training course on the work-related stress and burnout. In addition, it will also feature additional digital content, features and tools, including professional counselling via a series of podcasts, additional resources and a dedicated stress diary to help track individual progress and set personal training goals.

The StressOut First Aid Kit will be a dedicated resource aiming to help equip individuals with a necessary knowledge on how to act in more extreme severe situations springing from stress or burnout at the workplace.

The Stress Awareness Days is the dedicated campaign which will run once an year in every partnering country to engage various stakeholders to work together, raise awareness on problems related to mental health, anxiety, burnout and other stress-related factors.

Coordinator of the StressOut project is Business Innovation Centre Innobridge (Bulgaria) partnering with a total of 5 other organisations from 5 European countries of which Coordina Strategy and Sustainable Results is proud to be part of.

Coordina is a consulting firm that operates in the following business areas: Human Resources, Innovation, Strategy and Management Systems, and Corporate Social Responsibility. Among all the services provided, Coordina already works in the delivery of consulting and training services in the field of Human Resources, including the implementation of best practices and innovative strategies to optimize the performance of its employees and improve their quality of life.

We invite you to take part in the project and get notified about its activities by subscribing for the official StressOut project newsletter here.

Should you have any queries related to the StressOut project, please feel free to contact Manuel Quílez through the following email: m.quilez@coordina-oerh.com

Visit https://stressout-project.eu/ now to learn more or follow us on Facebook @stressout.project and LinkedIn @stressout-project.