The science behind Noon

How would you rate your relationship with work?

This question may sound a little peculiar. But let’s reflect on it for a sec, so what’s the first thing that comes to mind when reflecting on the relationship you have with your job? Let’s say you have the choice of going back to the very start of it, would you swipe your job to the left or to the right?

​Match or Mismatch

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Christina Maslach, a UC Berkeley psychology professor, and Michael P. Leiter, an organizational psychologist, understand why the quality of this relationship matters so much. The two share a lifetime of research together and are widely recognized as authorities on assessing and promoting mental health in the workplace. Their recent studies reveal an increasing mismatch between workers and workplaces, which is not an individual problem, but one that comes down to the relationship between an individual and their place of work.

Among the most significant on-the-job hazards employees face today is chronic stress and what it can lead to in terms of burnout. It’s also among the most misunderstood. Some psychologists deny its existence altogether, while others characterize it as a personal issue — a problem employees should fix themselves by getting therapy, practicing relaxation techniques, or changing jobs.

Areas of Worklife

In 2019, the World Health Organization defined burnout as an occupational phenomenon, not a medical one. Maslach and Leiter share the conviction that managing stress is (at least in part) an occupational responsibility based on identifying and eliminating mismatches between the workplace and the worker. Combining their fieldwork with literature studies, the two pioneering researchers identified key causes of workplace stress and revealed what managers can do to promote increased productivity and health. They laid out how organizations can ensure an ideal job-person match, based on 6 areas of work-life:

When developing our tool Noon, we researched how startups, scaleups and corporates go about the wellbeing of their employees. It became evident to us that the 6 areas of worklife are a solid basis for assessing employees' relationships with their work. We learned that, by regularly reflecting, both individuals and teams are empowered to learn about what suits them and how to level up, both in terms of productivity and health. Managing stress is part of this game, and actually a useful resource, when approached consciously, measured meticulously, and managed effectively.

Providing a safe space

One important factor in getting the ball rolling on monitoring & improving well-being is promoting a culture where reflections and providing feedback are guaranteed to be safe. Openly admitting that work is stressful in the heat of the moment is hard. Determining the root causes of stress at that very moment is even harder. This is where the Noon scan steps in. Noon regularly checks in with team members to find out how they feel about work. The way we do is privacy-friendly. We never share personal insights with anyone.

Suggestions for improvement

Noon is built to interpret user data determine teams’ relationship with work across the 6 Areas and spot stressors effectively. Benchmarked data serves as a basis to provide suggestions for interventions to managers empowering them to improve the workplace. We provide suggestions for interventions on an individual-, team, and organizational level. If necessary we call on help from experts affiliated with Noon to support organizations in designing tailor-made interventions and implementing improvements.

Prove growth and impact

Acting on team feedback is key to improving the workplace effectively. Actions set in motion via the Noon platform are evaluated with the team, benchmarked, and offered in an anonymized way to other teams with similar characteristics.  Organisational growth is reflected in improved scores on Areas of Worklife and e-NPS scores. This way Noon proves the impact of well-being strategies on an ever-growing number of organisations.