Hello everyone, my name is Thomas Breideband and I am here to present our work on Home-Life and Work
Rhythm Diversity in Distributed Teamwork. As we are all aware, many information workers
saw their daily work experience radically change with the sudden shift to working from home. Now,
more than 2 years in, the general tenor among employees still appears to be that full-time
remote work should remain a viable alternative to co-located work in the future. Studies have begun
exploring the challenges and benefits of full-time work-from-home for remote teams. Some of these new
challenges were the focus of our paper. In particular, our focus was on perceptions
of team diversity in teams of information work practitioners,
that is, people who use computers on a daily basis, who engage in cognitively demanding tasks,
and whose work with others happens both synchronously and asynchronously.
The fields of CSCW and HCI have a long history of research into factors that lead to the success of
distributed teamwork. Olson and Olson have highlighted how distance matters in daily
remote teams and how teams need to have a pro-active mindset about addressing remote
work’s unique challenges. Here, social factors such as trust and common ground,
a mindset of collaboration readiness, common conventions, and shared identity are important.
With this in mind, we analyzed interviews with 57 information workers that we conducted in a
staggered fashion between October 2nd 2020 and June 16th, 2021. The interviews were
part of a longitudinal, mixed-methods study of real-world teams during the pandemic.
where participants came from areas such as consulting, programming, administration, and some also from startups.
In the absence of a theory and due to our interest in exploring team diversity
in the novel context of the pandemic, we used a constructivist grounded theory
approach for our analysis. With some prior knowledge about remote teaming,
we began with open coding followed by rounds of axial and selective coding, and then seeing if
a core concept emerged from the interview data. Our analysis revealed three main themes related
to team diversity in remote work-from-home. In particular, we found that while working from home,
participants became aware of certain types of diversity in their teams
that had remained inconspicuous when teamwork happened in the office.
We further found both positive and negative expressions of diversity mindsets related
to the work from home context, that is people’s attitudes and views of diversity
in their team. And we also learned how teams adapted to the then novel circumstances.
First, participants shared that in the wake of their transition to work from home they
became aware of types of diversity in their teams that had remained latent and mostly
inconsequential while their teams worked in the office. These included diversity in the
homelife responsibilities of team members as well as diversity in personal work rhythms.
Home life diversity encompasses the kinds of circumstances and conditions that may
contribute to differences between team members relating to their domestic lives: marital status, the
size of their household, presence of dependents, having access to a private workspace at home,
and so forth, and their personal work-from-home workstyles…that is, how they manage
domestic roles with their job roles and work styles, and how they manage distractions or
disruptions that emerge from their home lives such as responding to parenting needs, for example.
One participant emphasized the unique insights that workers gain from being brought into their
teammates’ homes and personal lives…The participant said: “we see things that you
wouldn’t see in a working environment where we’re all working in the same space.”
Work-from-home also introduced new in-group/out-group dynamics
and challenges in a team. One participant discussed perceived
differences between singles and teammates with families and that each would go about their
day differently. And it also informs what types of distractions and disruptions exist for each
person while working from home. And especially the latter part we also experienced first
hand during some of the interviews when we would briefly have to pause the interview because a family member
required our interviewee’s immediate attention. Besides differences in home lives, participants
also expressed awareness for their own and other teammates’ work hours and work rhythms,
which had become more personalized and fluid during the pandemic. Work rhythms orient
employees along their daily work schedules to prevent any misalignment from significantly
affecting team processes. One participant here mentioned how this creates an awkward divide though
in the team between early people and those who prefer to have a later work schedule.
Participants expressed different attitudes and views of diversity---their diversity
mindsets-- particularly when it came to home life diversity and to managing the differences related
to childcare responsibilities. In the case of our study, one participant highlighted the existence
of compassion and understanding for those in the team who had to juggle work and parenting. Another
participant, however, pointed to the impact that differences in childcare responsibilities
may have on social interactions, stating that the other one with without kids, like, he gets stuff.
And it’s nice, but obviously, they’re just like, there’s no talking about parenting with him.
Beyond a widely expressed spirit of commiseration between team members
that would help the team manage remote work’s challenges, we found that team leads took over
central and guiding roles in how to adapt to the new context with their teams.
One team lead took team members’ work schedule preferences into account when creating team
meeting schedules, stating: We schedule our team stand up meeting at 11 o’clock. And that
seems to be a really good time, because it’s still early enough for the early people. But
it’s late enough that the late people are able to get some things going as well.
Team leads seemed to regard diverse work rhythms less as a bottleneck for productivity, but rather
as an opportunity for improving work performance. In this sense, team leads utilized awareness as
both an antidote to the possible ramifications of home-life and work rhythm diversity and to
facilitate effective internal team processes. Taking a step back, what do our findings say
about team diversity in remote work from home? Many of the challenges that participants addressed
in regards to home-life and work rhythm diversity may be remedied by facilitating
awareness in a team. We found that when the home becomes the primary workplace, information about
co-workers’ family members and living situations play a more prominent and visible role not
just for the individual worker but in certain situations also for the rest of the team.
A pro-active sharing of information related to differences in home life responsibilities could help
foster understanding and trust. A commitment to empathy and understanding can also help
mitigate the need for team leads to intervene in situations where it may be necessary.
Visualizations of work rhythms could also be used to foster awareness. Utilizing data such as computer
activity, calendar events, locations of the individuals, and time spent on e-mail and other
applications can help to infer the temporal patterns of individuals. The data can reveal
meaningful periodic (daily/weekly/monthly) patterns among and within team members,
which can then help facilitate better scheduling of collaborative activities in the team,
enable remote teams to develop a sense of their co-workers’ routines or schedules,
and by extension help to better manage the remote work experience overall.
Thank you so very much for watching. We encourage everyone to read our paper
for more details and discussion. And if you have any questions,
please feel free to contact me at: tbreideband@outlook.com