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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 PiMuNu on Friday May 19, @12:09PM (2 children)
> management wants ... to convince you to accept lower pay and/or crappier working conditions
I am sad if you have experienced such an adversarial and evil management culture. I realise they do exist.
> So being "person who is friendly enough and has some safe interests like sports or gardening but doesn't have strong work friends" is generally the position you want to be in.
It depends on your values. If your values are focused on finance and job security then what you say is correct. That is not true for many (potentially most) people. "Pay the mortgage and have some fun on the way."
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Friday May 19, @12:38PM
Oh, a lot of those bosses were perfectly friendly about it. It's not that they hated me personally, it's the policies they're working under, and the fact that part of what they're paid to do is keep salary growth under control.
Company management does what's profitable. Why do you think this study was even commissioned? They think this kind of thing will help their bottom line, and that means it's going to be used for the purposes of convincing employees to put up with stuff they otherwise wouldn't.
I'm not saying you actually have to be "boring guy". I'm saying that you don't discuss the fun stuff with coworkers, because it can only hurt you, not help you. For example, if you talk about going to wild parties, even if you didn't do anything that might prompt a drug test depending on how much of a hard-ass your boss or HR is.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Saturday May 20, @01:33PM
I had to get three managers fired before I finally got a decent one who can do a proper job. There are more crappy managers than you might be aware of.