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The benefits of self-tracking have been thoroughly investigated in private areas of life, like health or sustainable living, but less attention has been given to the impact and benefits of self-tracking in work-related settings. Through two field studies, we introduced and evaluated a mood self-tracking application in two call centers to investigate the role of mood self-tracking at work, as well as its impact on individuals and teams. Our studies indicate that mood self-tracking is accepted and can improve performance if the application is well integrated into the work processes and matches the management style. The results show that (i) capturing moods and explicitly relating them to work tasks facilitated reflection, (ii) mood self-tracking increased emotional awareness and this improved cohesion within teams, and (iii) proactive reactions by managers to trends and changes in team members’ mood were key for acceptance of reflection and correlated with measured improvements in work performance. These findings help to better understand the role and potential of self-tracking in work settings and further provide insights that guide future researchers and practitioners to design and introduce these tools in a workplace setting.

This paper presents a concept for in-app reflection guidance and its evaluation in four work-related field trials. By synthesizing across four field trials, we can show that computer-based reflection guidance can function in the workplace, in the sense of being accepted as technology, being perceived as useful and leading to reflective learning. This is encouraging for all endeavours aiming to transfer existing knowledge on reflection supportive technology from educational settings to the workplace. However,reflective learning in our studies was mostly visible to limited depth in textual entries made in the applications themselves; and proactive reflection guidance technology like prompts were often found to be disruptive. We offer these two issues as highly relevant questions for future research.