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posted by janrinok on Friday May 19 2023, @09:39AM   Printer-friendly

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


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 19 2023, @11:58AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 19 2023, @11:58AM (#1306990)

    I suspect you are an outlier, your Venn diagram has two circles, one for friends and another for co-workers that don't intersect with each other. Most people I know have some overlap between those circles, the size of the overlap varies.

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  • (Score: 1, Flamebait) by Opportunist on Friday May 19 2023, @08:16PM (1 child)

    by Opportunist (5545) on Friday May 19 2023, @08:16PM (#1307058)

    If you go to work to meet new people and find friends, my suggestion is to get a life.

    • (Score: 2) by GloomMower on Sunday May 21 2023, @12:38AM

      by GloomMower (17961) on Sunday May 21 2023, @12:38AM (#1307183)

      Maybe not why you go to work, but maybe you make friends along the way anyway?