SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Researchers Design Tool to Enhance Workplace Socialization in Remote, Hybrid Arrangements:
About one-third of our lives are spent at work, and the relationships we build there can have personal and professional benefits. But a majority of workers indicate difficulty connecting with co-workers socially, especially in the new landscape of remote and hybrid work arrangements.
To ease the friction caused by reduced in-person interaction, a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute created a Slack application that helps to initiate casual conversations and create affinity groups in an online workspace.
"We were freshly out of the pandemic, and we realized that everyone around us was complaining about how it's hard to build genuine connections," said Shreya Bali, the project's principal investigator who earned her master's degree from CMU's School of Computer Science in 2022. "Online modes of communication do provide us with the technical tools to make connections, but there is still a lot of hesitation to actually initiate such conversations when you are not in the same room as someone."
The team's new application, called Nooks, offers users a low-risk way to start new conversations in three phases: creation, incubation and activation. It starts with someone anonymously submitting a topic of interest. Then, the topic is incubated while the system presents it to other Slack users, allowing them to indicate if they are interested in the same topic. Once the incubation period is over, a private channel — or "nook" — is activated for this newly identified affinity group.
"Typically, when everyone's in the office at the same time, you can usually tell that if someone is near the water cooler it's OK to go and disturb them. Or if someone is walking in the corridor, you can start a conversation as you walk past," said Pranav Khadpe, an HCII Ph.D. student and one of the paper's co-authors. "But online, we don't have those lightweight signals. Nooks can help to replace these social cues."
[...] "Anyone interested can hop into a nook and break the ice without any preconceived notion of who is in the group," Bali said. "This helps to avoid social anxiety of, say, not knowing anyone in the Nook or feeling intimidated if you see it includes colleagues of a different team or higher level."
[...] "Beyond supporting personal wellbeing, positive social interactions at work diffuse ideas, accelerate decision-making, promote better collaboration and enhance productivity," Khadpe said. "It's a neat win-win situation that Nooks can help facilitate."
arXiv link: Nooks: Social Spaces to Lower Hesitations in Interacting with New People at Work
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aafcac on Friday May 19 2023, @11:54AM (9 children)
Autistic people finally got a chance to be full members of the workforce during the pandemic, and now y'all are trying to undo the progress? Why on Earth do we need people at work to be connecting? If it doesn't naturally happen, then I don't see what the real point of it is. It's less than 1/4 of a typical worker's life, I fail to see what the problem is. If y'all need all that social connecting, perhaps use the 1/3 of your life that you're not at work, sleeping or commuting to do that and leave the rest of us in peace.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday May 19 2023, @12:47PM (1 child)
Heh: you hear everyone talking about how 'Facebook keeps me connected with what's going on', but then they spend all their time 'catching up'.
Just shut up, do the job! Catch up on Facebook.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Friday May 19 2023, @02:24PM
S lot of that comes from the view that people have to work 40 hours in order to have any right to expect to be fed. If the work is being done with all the slacking off, that implies that there's too much time being given to do the work.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 19 2023, @12:50PM (3 children)
Such a dumbass comment.
If you're doing a job you're moderately interested in, and the people around you are too, it's inevitable that you will probably get along with them. And want to discuss ideas. You might even have lunch or a beer with them. How terrible!
(Score: 3, Informative) by aafcac on Friday May 19 2023, @02:22PM (1 child)
Reread my comment. In that environment, there wouldn't be much work connecting. It would mostly happen on its own. I fail to see why this is even something to worry about. If anything office chatter is just a waste of time in most cases, it would make far more sense to just let people leave if they have to fill the time with chatter.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 19 2023, @04:25PM
My reading of this summary is that this is to help things happen on their own. It is to help the people who might want to connect with other people, but don't feel comfortable in doing it on their own due to their working remotely and not being able to pick up on social cues. Obviously, if they don't want to connect, they don't need to join these chat rooms. Some people are perfectly happy working in isolation and working from their kitchen table, but other people benefit with having some level of social interaction. I, personally, miss having people around. I don't want to be pestered all the time when I'm trying to work, but I also don't want to sit around isolated. Water cooler chat can provide a very nice and needed mental break if you're stuck on a problem.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Saturday May 20 2023, @01:31PM
And me getting along with them is dependent on breathing the same air they do? If you can't figure out whether someone can do his job properly without sitting in the same room as them, I guess you are not capable of figuring out whether someone is actually capable of his job and base your assumption about their abilities on something other than their actual professional abilities.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Saturday May 20 2023, @01:28PM (2 children)
Because they don't want that for the same reason they don't want a leg-up for underprivileged people: As long as they can't compete, they ain't competition.
If these people had to compete purely on their ability to do some sensible work instead of buttering up the boss, they'd be out of their league very fast.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Saturday May 20 2023, @07:11PM (1 child)
That's been one of the major things improving for us in recent years. We still have the worst employment rates of pretty much any disability, but companies are starting to recognize how valuable it is to have people that mostly just want to get our work done and are willing to actually answer questions that higher ups have about what's going on honestly. An entire company of us would likely crash and burn, but a few can be downright helpful.
It does make sucking up in the traditional sense a lot harder to benefit from. I'm not sorry.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Saturday May 20 2023, @09:38PM
Autists have two things going for them: They're quite honest and they don't play the corporate game. They simply and plainly don't care about that whole social backstabbing.
If you can handle their particular needs, what you have there is the perfect employee.