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: 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.