Comparison of Subjective and Physiological Stress Levels in Home and Office Work Environments

ABSTRACT

Work stress can have serious deleterious effects for individuals and society and therefore its management is of great importance. Work environment has been demonstrated as one of the significant factors effecting work stress. Recently, COVID-19 has led to an increased frequency of individuals working in hybrid work environments mainly comprising of home and office environments. The effects these work environments have on individuals’ mental stress is important to understand for both employers and employees so they can mitigate and effectively manage the mental stress. In this paper, we present an intelligent approach to predict the stress occurrences using the physiological data acquired from individuals working in both remote and office locations. Multiple factors are collected related to physiological indicators of stress and subjective performance level. We developed a boosted tree ensemble model which produced binary stress classification accuracy of 99.9%. The statistical outcomes indicate that there is no overall correlation between mental stress and productivity, however there is some indication of mental stress being is influenced by the work environment, the time of day and the day of the week. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.