With so many people working from home since the Covid Pandemic began we really are at a digital crossroads and this project couldn’t have come at a better time for both businesses and employees.
Some employees feel like they are ‘always on’ and that they have lost their routine over the last year. This may be combined with, not just working from home but also juggling childcare, and everything else that has changed over the last year.
The working day may lack structure and emails may come in at all hours of the day. Employees may feel under pressure to respond to them, and this can lead, not only to the employee becoming burnt out, but also the employer not getting the quality of work they had hoped for or expected. Happy employees make a happy team, and this enthusiasm transfers onto the work.
DIGITAL CROSSROADS aims to design, develop, and implement a new approach to train European SME managers in employee digital wellbeing.
Many large corporations are already addressing digital overload, via wellbeing policies within their HR/CSR work. In a 2018 study of 500 senior HR executives from global organisations, 70% stated that policies to promote digital wellbeing were important. A similar study, though, found that 82% of SME employers do NOT have any digital health or wellbeing policies nor plans to introduce them. Moreover, our own research showed the issue is so new that no enterprise development or business training providers currently offers structured guidance on the topic: they too are unaware and unequipped.
The first tangible results of the project will be the intellectual outputs:
- IO1: Digital Wellbeing Pathway Creator. An interactive online tool enabling SME managers to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses in relation to employee digital wellbeing and to determine a suitable pathway through the subsequent learning materials (IO2). A separate version will be designed for business advisors so they can apply the tool with a larger number of clients.
- IO2: Digital Crossroads Training Programme. A complete set of learning objectives, training materials and case studies providing SME Managers and business advisors to gain the knowledge, skills and self-belief required to implement an in-company programme to prevent employee digital overload.
We invite you to visit the website where you can find out more about the Digital Crossroads project: https://www.digitalcrossroads.eu/
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Digital Crossroads is an Erasmus+ project bringing together partners from the United Kingdom, Denmark, Ireland and Germany.
