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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: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday May 19, @10:51AM (12 children)
A certain level of casual conversation is fine, but if you want to know why management wants you be building important personal relationships with your coworkers, it's because they will attempt to use that to convince you to accept lower pay and/or crappier working conditions (including but not limited to unpaid overtime) based on your loyalty to your work friends. Also, your coworkers are generally who you're competing against for raises and promotions, regardless of whether your boss admits that.
You have to be prepared for those kinds of relationships to end abruptly due to the financial needs of one or both of you or a completely arbitrary decision by managers who might not even know you. You also need to be careful about what you do and don't say to a coworker, because they might use that against you if they're the more back-stabbing sort.
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.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Opportunist on Friday May 19, @11:38AM (5 children)
Coworkers are not my friends. I can choose my friends, I cannot choose my coworkers.
That's also not necessary. All I ask from a coworker is that he does his job and does not impede mine. I don't expect any kind of "moral" support or emotional investment in my life.
In other words, no, I don't give a fuck about your soon-to-be-baby's ultrasound pictures. And I don't expect you to be interested in my x-ray pics.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 19, @11:58AM (2 children)
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.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Opportunist on Friday May 19, @08:16PM (1 child)
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, @12:38AM
Maybe not why you go to work, but maybe you make friends along the way anyway?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Gaaark on Friday May 19, @12:44PM (1 child)
I'm basically the same: plus, it's harder to reprimand someone you're 'chummy' with.
How do you fire your 'friend'? Much easier if it's 'someone you work with/works for you/works under you'.
But yeah. Let me do my job, you do yours, i go home where my real friends/family are. It's harder to do that with someone creating drama drama drama, or showing EVERY SINGLE PERSON WITHIN 100 YARDS their photos of the new babby and the babby daddy/momma holding teh babby and how cute, the babby just spit up!
Yes, i know it's baby. But annoying parents turn them into babbies.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Opportunist on Friday May 19, @08:18PM
Show me pictures of your spawn and you're actually getting more likely to get fired. Not only are you not working, you're keeping me from doing it. By bothering me with something that is annoying and a waste of my time and yours.
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 19, @12:47PM
Not only that, but be prepared for managers to expect to waltz right into your friendships and ride roughshod over them. Could be that "boss" types lack social graces, but it is hard to keep respect for people who interrupt a friendly interaction with a reminder to empty the shredder wastebasket when it's full. Yeah, douchebag. thanks for that advice.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mhajicek on Friday May 19, @03:08PM (1 child)
Work friends can be a benefit in the long run. After that company crashes and burns, they might get you an in at another company, or feed work your way when you've gone independent.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 19, @03:57PM
It doesn't even have to be a crash & burn situation. The best customers & projects for my tiny engineering company come from people we've worked with in the past and have kept in touch with as friends.