How Reflective Automated eCoaching Can Help Employees Improve their Capacity for Resilience: A Mixed Methods Study (Preprint)

BACKGROUND An eHealth tool that guides employees through the process of reflection has the potential to support employees with moderate levels of stress to increase their capacity for resilience. Most eHealth tools that include self-tracking summarise the collected data for the users. However, users need to gain a deeper understanding of the data and decide upon the next step to take through self-reflection. OBJECTIVE In this study, we aimed to examine: (1) the perceived effectiveness of the guidance offered by an automated eCoach during employees’ self-reflection process in gaining insights into their situation and on their perceived stress and resilience capacities; and (2) the usefulness of the design elements of the eCoach during this process. METHODS Of the twenty-eight participants, fourteen completed the six-week BringBalance programme that allowed participants to perform reflection via four phases (Gilbert and Trudel, 2001): 1) identification, 2) strategy generation, 3) experimentation, and 4) evaluation. Data collection consisted of log data, EMA questionnaires for reflection provided by the eCoach, in-depth interviews, and a pre-and post-test survey (including the Brief Resilience Scale and the Perceived Stress Scale). The post-test survey also asked about the utility of the elements of the eCoach for reflection. RESULTS Although users did not perceive a beneficial effect on stress and resilience capacities, the automated eCoach did enable users to gain an understanding of factors that influenced their stress levels and capacity for resilience and to learn the principles of useful strategies to improve their capacity for resilience. Design elements of the eCoach reduced the reflection process into smaller steps to re-evaluate situations and helped them to observe a trend. However, users experienced difficulties integrating the chosen strategies into their daily life. Moreover, the identified events related to stress and resilience were too specific through the guidance offered by the eCoach and the events did not recur, which consequently left users unable to sufficiently practise, experiment, and evaluate the techniques during meaningful events. CONCLUSIONS Although participants did not report improvements to their stress and resilience capacities, they were able to perform self-reflection under the guidance of the automated eCoach, which often led towards gaining new insights. To improve the reflection process, more guidance should be offered by the eCoach that would aid employees to identify events that recur in daily life. Future research could study the effects of the suggested improvements on the quality of reflection via an automated eCoach.