Inspiration
With COVID-19 increasing the distance between people and work from home becoming the new norm, growing concerns for mental health have become apparent. According to a survey by TELUS International, 45% of employees felt less healthy mentally while working from home during the pandemic citing feelings of loneliness, anxiety, and depression. How can employers check-in before their employees check out?
What it does
Introducing ShareMood, an interactive platform for employees to check-in by anonymously sharing their current mood. Each submission will be posted to a company-wide board where employees can connect and empathize through comments. With unhappy employees reporting to cost the North American economy over $350 billion per year, anonymity will allow employees to express themselves freely and provide valuable insights for managers to act immediately.
How we built it
Our technology stack for this project included HTML, CSS, Javascript, Node.js, and the Express and EJS libraries.
We started laying out our design on Figma, with a mock-up UI, and translated the design to two front-end web pages, with HTML and CSS. At the same team, members of our team worked on the back-end code, researching and learning how to use Node.js packages to connect the back-end to the front-end infrastructure.
The backend was built using Javascript which handled the placement.
Challenges I ran into
One of our team’s biggest challenges was using new languages, frameworks, and libraries that we are unfamiliar with. Our day was filled with many stressful hours of documentation-reading and googling.
We started with the front-end implementation and did not build a database to store the data. So when a user submits a form, we have no place to hold that, and the board could not read the data from the database and put sticky notes on the board.
We were all unfamiliar with Node.js and starting our own web-app project from scratch so we struggled to start our project and determine what frameworks and packages to use, which ate up a considerable amount of time.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We implemented two dynamic web pages and accomplished the very difficult task of working with server-side code for the first time. We are proud that our team did not give up despite facing many challenges and completed our first online hackathon!
What We learned
We learned how to work with how client-side and server-side code interacts and connects with each other. We learned the basics of Node.js, Express, and Embedded JavaScript (EJS). We also learned that teamwork and passion for technology are crucial in a hackathon.
What's next for ShareMood
In the future, we would like to expand our functionalities. One of the functionalities is to filter the user input. Mental health assistance will be provided to any user who attempts to submit abnormally negative or dark thoughts. Another functionality is to provide an avenue for data analytics and visualization for HR personnel. They will be able to more easily conduct strategies to improve employee morale and target mental health issues.
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