Social media data has been increasingly used to discover trends ranging from the spread of flu to commuting patterns and even nightlife habits.  Might it also be valuable in helping to detect stress levels in the workplace?

That was the question posed by a new study from researchers at the University of Central Florida.  They crunched around 2 billion tweets from nearly 50 million people to hunt down work related tweets, of which there were around 8 million in total.

They then trawled through these in more detail to try and find instances depicting stress using a linguistic inquiry and word count.

Tweeting about stress

The next step was to overlay the data they’d collected to the days when each tweet was made so that they gained an understanding of all the tweets made on Monday and so on.  The aim was to understand whether there were particular days where stress would be shared online.

As Bob Geldof famously sang, we really don’t like Mondays, with Twitter stress peaking at the start of the week and gradually declining as the week progresses.  Fridays would see the biggest reduction, suggesting we’re already mentally onto the weekend.

Interestingly, on Twitter at least, our stress levels seemed to plateau, before gradually increasing again on Saturday, before rocketing up again on Sunday as work looms on the horizon.

Suffice to say, the researchers weren’t just looking out for our gloomier tweets.  They also trawled the data for positive work related content.  This uncovered a slightly different trend, with the weekends seeing a peek of positive tweets.  This suggests that even though we might feel stressed by work, the weekend still helps to restore our energies for the days ahead.

What does this mean?

Other than an interesting finding, what practical value does this research bring us?  Well, it sheds some light into how stress tends to undulate through the week rather than remain constant throughout.

Various other studies have highlighted the value in scheduling our most challenging tasks for when we have the most energy to devote to them.  Managers might also wish to make the transition from weekend to work slightly easier by easing employees back into things on Monday, and perhaps even ensuring that any stress related factors are resolve on Friday so that the weekend’s restorative effects are experienced to their fullest.

Aside from the practical, it also offers another interesting insight into the value we can glean from mining the social web.