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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, Informative) by janrinok on Friday May 19 2023, @01:38PM (1 child)

    by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 19 2023, @01:38PM (#1307005) Journal

    I'd like to be able to comment on submissions, same as the Green site allowed pre-"Beta"...do they still do that?

    The problem with this is that the discussion simply moves from the stories on the front page to the stories that are in the submission queue. Then, when they do arrive on the front page everyone who has an interesting point to make has already made it, and they are simply ignored for any further serious discussion. As the point of this site is the discussion itself - we are not primarily trying to compete with news sites or being first with breaking information - the discussions are better managed on the front page than they are in the submission queue. The idea has been discussed by staff and the community several times but it always seems to come back to the same conclusion.

    Some people are already doing a version of what you suggest by finding something interesting in the submission queue and then starting a journal about it. I have no problems with this - that is what the journals are essentially for. However, if you look at the submission queue at the time I release this comment you will see that there are only 7 submissions left. I have been away for almost a week for personal reasons and without me running the bot there is a very limited amount of submissions from the community.

    As a rule of thumb we actually need to receive about twice as many submissions per day than we can publish - so around 16-20 submissions a day is not an uncommon requirement, the excess of course does not get used but hoping to receive the 8 - 10 perfect submissions a day is an editor's unfulfilled dream.

    --
    I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 19 2023, @04:08PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 19 2023, @04:08PM (#1307023)

    janrinok - thanks for the comments, and as always for your contribution to SN! It is nice to hear that this has been discussed by SN staff.

    My memory of the Green site was only a few comments on submissions. Many were along the lines of a "merge" where a commenter would add a link(s) or other material on the same topic or same story--possibly helpful to editors? Comments on submissions were removed if/when the story was moved to the front page, so that was a disincentive to carrying on a discussion in the sub queue. I'd guess that if a sub attracted more than a couple of comments, that could also be a clue to the editors that the topic was of interest to readers...?

    I noticed that the SN queue is low and I've been on the lookout for something interesting...will submit if I do.