RAPID: Teaming in the Time of Covid-19: Understanding how technology affordances can enable collaboration during sudden workplace disruption

RAPID：Covid-19 时代的团队合作：了解技术可供性如何在工作场所突然中断期间实现协作

• 批准号: 2027572
• 负责人: Noshir Contractor
• 金额: $ 12万
• 依托单位: Northwestern University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2020-08-01 至 2022-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2027572&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: RAPID; Teaming; Time; Covid; 19

Organizations have contemplated and - in some cases - experimented with the idea of remote work for several decades. The spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has enlisted the world in an involuntary and instantaneous "beta-test" of remote work at scale. In the span of a few weeks, shelter-in-place orders have come down from government agencies in the US and elsewhere requiring organizations to transition nearly their entire workforces to remote work arrangements instantaneously. Undoubtedly, these rapid and wholesale shifts to remote work arrangements are leveraging recent advances in the development of digital collaboration platforms that enable teams to communicate via text, audio, and video and to share and edit documents in real-time. However, until now, we have not had the need (or the will) to experimentally - and at scale - assess the ability of digital collaboration platforms to support an all remote workforce. The pandemic offers us an unprecedented opportunity to understand how the sudden switch to remote collaboration presents challenges and opportunities to distributed teams. Thus, this research seeks to answer fundamental questions about how workers organize for remote work before, during, and after a sudden shift to remote collaboration. This includes exploring the lasting impacts of COVID-19 on organizations, even after returning to the "new normal." This project draws insights from studying workers. It leverages surveys (including questions about their social networks), HR data, as well as data from collaboration server logs that have been collected over the past year, prior to the pandemic, from four organizations. These data will be augmented by collecting new data from these same organizations to understand remote work during and post pandemic. These include surveys, HR data, collaboration server logs, as well as qualitative interviews. Taken together these longitudinal data will help us understand how the observed shifts in patterns of teamwork can be explained by the particular ways in which workers utilize technology before, during and after the COVID-19 crisis. It will explore how work-life blending and burnout differentially impact remote workers. Furthermore, to assess changes in how employees collaborate on and around digital platforms before, during, and after COVID-19 disruption, data will be collected that examine when and what workplace policies were put in place by organizations or other local, state or national agencies in response to COVID-19. These include decisions for partial evacuation of offices, total shelter-at-home, lay-offs for certain categories of employees, leave without pay for others, mandatory use of certain technologies, as well as phased re-entry back into the office. As such, the research project will advance our fundamental understanding of the manner in which digital collaboration technologies provide challenges and opportunities to teams collaborating - including the most extreme scenario - remotely. It will also provide an evidentiary base for how workplace related policy interventions impact the use of technology for teamwork. Results from this research will contribute to generating policy recommendations about how technologies should be used to enable collaboration at key transition points during a future crisis of this magnitude.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

几十年来，组织已经考虑并 - 在某些情况下 - 尝试了远程工作的想法。新颖的冠状病毒（Covid-19）的传播以大规模的远程作品的非自愿和瞬时的“ beta测试”邀请了世界。在几周的时间里，现场命令的命令来自美国和其他地方的政府机构，要求组织几乎将整个劳动力过渡到远程工作安排。毫无疑问，这些快速而批发的转变为远程工作安排，利用了数字协作平台开发的最新进步，这些平台使团队能够通过文本，音频和视频进行交流，并实时共享和编辑文档。但是，到目前为止，我们还没有（或意志）在实验上（或大规模）评估数字协作平台支持所有远程劳动力的能力。大流行为我们提供了一个前所未有的机会，以了解突然转向远程协作的方式如何提出分配团队的挑战和机会。因此，本研究试图回答有关工人如何在突然转移到远程协作之前，之中和之后如何组织远程工作的基本问题。这包括探索Covid-19对组织的持久影响，即使返回“新常态”。该项目从研究工人那里获取见解。它利用了调查（包括有关其社交网络的问题），人力资源数据以及从四个组织之前在大流行之前收集的协作服务器日志的数据。这些数据将通过从这些相同组织中收集新数据来了解大流行期间的远程工作，从而增强这些数据。这些包括调查，人力资源数据，协作服务器日志以及定性访谈。总之，这些纵向数据将有助于我们了解团队合作模式的观察到的变化如何通过工人在Covid-19-19-19-19-19危机之前，之中和之后使用技术的特定方式来解释。它将探索工作与生活的融合和倦怠如何差异化远程工人。此外，要评估员工在COVID-19中断之前，期间和之后的员工如何在数字平台上进行协作的变化，将收集数据，这些数据审查了组织或其他本地，州或国家机构对COVID-19的何时以及其他地方，州或国家机构制定了哪些工作场所政策。其中包括决定部分撤离办公室的决定，全家庇护所，某些类别的员工的裁员，不付钱给他人付款，强制使用某些技术以及分阶段的重新进入办公室。因此，研究项目将促进我们对数字协作技术方式为合作的团队（包括最极端情况）提供挑战和机遇方式的基本理解。它还将为工作场所相关的政策干预措施如何影响技术用于团队合作的情况提供证据基础。这项研究的结果将有助于制定有关如何使用技术在这一范围的未来危机期间在关键过渡点进行合作的政策建议。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并认为值得通过基金会的知识分子优点和更广泛的影响标准通过评估来进行评估。