Staying socially connected in remote knowledge work teams

As remote work is becoming more prevalent, the informal, spontaneous conversations regularly encountered in co-located work become less frequent because knowledge workers lack essential cues about their colleagues, such as their state of attention or current location. The lack of such social interactions can lead to feelings of isolation at work. While existing approaches focus mainly on improving team awareness to ameliorate coordination and collaboration problems caused by remote work, fewer tools focus on fostering informal, spontaneous communication to reduce the feeling of isolation. To address this gap, our approach focuses on people, their moods and current status, and opportunities for spontaneous interactions to create more social awareness. To this end, we developed AmbientTeams, an unobtrusive and informal tool that aims to reduce the perceived distance between distant colleagues. AmbientTeams seeks to achieve this goal through a mood-based micro-blogging approach that allows knowledge workers to share moods and status updates with their team and provides various ways to respond to what has been shared. In a preliminary evaluation, we tested our research prototype on a group of five knowledge workers who used the tool for one week. The results show that AmbientTeams facilitated getting to know each other by sharing moods and bringing more natural communication, which is otherwise often lost in a remote setting. In general, the encouraging results show that our novel approach of allowing knowledge workers to quickly and easily share moods with their team can benefit them by enabling and encouraging a more informal, lighthearted way of communicating.

The key concepts of our approach were as follows:

• Focus on People and Micro-Blogging
  Our approach focuses on people both visually and content-wise, and enables informal communication through mood-based micro-blogging.
• Spontaneous Interactions
  Complementing micro-blogging, we believe that various opportunities for spontaneous interactions should be offered.
• Unobtrusive Design
  Our approach focuses on moods by emphasising them in a novel, unobtrusive user interface.

Student: Dario Bugmann

Supervisors: André Meyer, Dr., Alexander Lill, and Thomas Fritz, Prof. Dr.

Date: Feb-Jul 2021