Developing Competencies for Stress Resilience @SMEs Erasmus Project

Project Title

Developing Competencies for Stress Resilience @SMEs

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for vocational education and training

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Health and wellbeing; Enterprise, industry and SMEs (incl. entrepreneurship); New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

Health and safety in the workplace are part of the EU policy on employment and social affairs, under the Rights at Work directives. However, in spite of the large sums spent on risk prevention, there are certain areas where results are still limited. That is the case of work-related stress, which is dangerous and expensive as it affects performance, leads to frequent absences and, if prolonged, may result in serious health problems, such as cardiovascular or musculoskeletal diseases. Furthermore, with the advance towards the ubiquitous use of digital technology at work, new psychosocial risk factors and health hazards emerged, namely difficulty to focus, cognitive losses, deficits in social skills, sense of isolation, etc. The negative impact on productivity represents a major hidden cost in many organisations but especially in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Unlike larger enterprises, which have dedicated human resource specialists and welfare offices, managers in SMEs have few, if any, resources and no access to experts.

Developing Competences for Stress Resilience @SMEs (DeSTRESS) aims to provide an innovative VET-based solution to this problem. Building on existing research, partners will develop a VET curriculum supported by an innovative VET Digital Training Platform using the latest techniques in game-based training and gamification, complemented by a set of practical tools and resources to facilitate the transfer of learning into the workplace. This environment will expose the main psycho-social health risks and their real impact on the individuals’ life and on the companies’ productivity. Players will assume roles, enabling them to think back on their experiences with these specific situations and how it happened, and which solutions are available for each scenario. Besides raising awareness on the problem, the project outputs will enable owner, managers and even decision makers to plan for and to mitigate its occurrence and the negative consequences of work-based stress. For that purpose, both a policy report and recommendations will be produced. A network of facilitators will also be created as an open forum to debate these issues. As such, the project will contribute to strengthening key digital competences while preventing the inherent hazards.

Therefore, the project targets mainly employees, managers and owners of SMEs and micro companies. About 250 will be directly involved through the multiplier events and another 250 will be involved through direct contacts and other project activities like the network of facilitators. This network will also include about 100 HR consultants, health experts and decision makers leading to about 600 stakeholders directly involved in the project. Through a vast set of dissemination and exploitation activities, the consortium expects to reach 5000 stakeholders (from all the identified target groups).

The project follows the Key Action priorities by using ICT based methodologies, fostering more modern, dynamic, committed and professional environments inside the organisations, increasing the level of digital competence of the involved participants and increasing motivation and satisfaction in the daily work life. It will create open and innovative practices, in a digital era, developing learning materials and tools that support the effective use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in training. As a result of DeSTRESS, SMEs will benefit from improved staff productivity and will be better placed on the Digital Transformation whilst mitigating many of the negative consequences associated with it. The project will also contribute to improving the competitiveness of European SMEs enabling them to compete more effectively with larger, better resourced and digitally competent enterprises both in Europe and globally.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 245799 Eur

Project Coordinator

Iscte – Instituto Universitario de Lisboa & Country: PT

Project Partners

• CCS DIGITAL EDUCATION LIMITED
• FUNDACJA “MALOPOLSKA IZBA SAMORZADOWA”
• UNIVERSIDAD DE SEVILLA
• UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI VERONA
• VIRTUAL CAMPUS LDA
• CREATIVE THINKING DEVELOPMENT