Transcript Distance-matters

Distance Matters
Gary Olson & Judith Olson
Hy Loc
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Outline
 Collocated
Work
 Remote Work
 Four Concepts base on Observation
 Future Technology and Issues
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The Death of Distance
by Frances Cairncross
“Geography, borders, time zones—all are rapidly becoming
irrelevant to the way we conduct our business and personal
lives … .”
- 1997
“…new communications technologies are rapidly obliterating
distance as a relevant factor in how we conduct our business
and personal lives.”
- 2001
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“Distance is not only alive and well, it is in
several essential respect immortal”
- Olson & Olson
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Collocated Work
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Collocated Work Defined
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Location
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Common space
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Coworkers’ workspaces are a short distance away from each other
“Short”  No greater than 30 meters
Used for group interaction
Maybe work related interaction or otherwise
E.g. meeting rooms, lounges, hallways
Shared Artifacts
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Object used by all group member to facilitate work
E.g. displays, files, references
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Collocated Work Defined
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Maximally collocated
 Coworker
shares workspace and perform a majority of their
task if not all in this workspace
 Group members would work in a large room together: “war
room” or “project room”
 Members may or may not have other office space
 Members can move to a corner or an un-owned cubicle to
work independently with minimal disturbance.
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Collocated Work Observed
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Fluidity of participation
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Choice of working alone or spontaneously creating sub-groups within
the group
Easy transition between sub-groups
Fluidity is rated as very important to the timely completion of work
Awareness
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Able to instantly get peripheral information
Overhearing conversation that you should be involved with and having
the option to participate
Observing what others are doing and being aware of how long they’ve
worked on it
Etc…
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Collocated Work Observed
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Spatiality of Human Interaction
 Allow for reference
 Deictic reference
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by pointing to a specific artifact
“that component”, “this part”, “modification here”
Engineers holding meeting in front of design mounted on a wall
board  describing complex idea by drawing in the air
by hand and referencing it
 Air
 Spatial location of
artifacts and members may contain
information
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E.g. ordering of a list of functionality represent their importance
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“Confusion and misunderstandings happens all
the time. … However, participants working
face to face seldom feel disoriented or without
context.”
- Olson & Olson
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Collocated Key Characteristics
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Rapid Feedback
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Quick correction when there are noticed misunderstanding
Multiple Channel
Information flows from a person’s tone, facial expression, gestures, postures
 Able to convey subtle or complex messages
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Personal Information
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Nuanced Information
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Background of the source/person is known, will provide context to the
message.
Small differences of meaning can be conveyed
Shared Local Context
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Participant have similar situation (time of day, local events)
 Allows for easy socializing
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Collocated Key Characteristics
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Informal Hall Time
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Co-references
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Easily change focus of attention
Able to quickly tell how all the participant is reacting to whatever is going on
Implicit Cues
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Ease of establishing joint reference to objects
Gaze and gesture help explains deictic terms
Individual controls
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Impromptu interactions
Provides for opportunistic information exchange and social bonding
Cues of what is going on in the periphery
Important Contextual information
Spatiality of reference
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People and work objects are located in space
People and idea can be referred to spatially
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Collocated Results
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Double the output per unit of staff time
compared to the corporate average
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Reduce total time to market by two thirds
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Remote Work
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Remote Work
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Coworkers are located in different location and
physically unreachable
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Remote tools today
 Telephony
 Video and Audio Conferences
 Meeting rooms and desktop
 Chat
 File Transfer
 Application Sharing
 Virtual
reality
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Remote Tools Today – Issues
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Quality of communication over audio and video conferences
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Using the wrong medium to communicate with each other
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Who is talking? What is being referenced?
Difficult to set up and control.
Tacit acceptance of the communication shortcomings without actively
considering other communication tools
New behaviors emerge to compensate for communication
shortcomings
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Discourse rules, turn taking protocol, etc…
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Remote Work – Communication Tools
Failures
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Failure: No Motivation
 People
don’t want to share data because they work in an
environment where they are compensated for their
knowledge
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Aids scientist fear of losing out on discovery
Workers who are rewarded for what they know are reluctant to use
new tool to share information
Failure: Un-readiness for communication technology
 A group
may not be ready for certain communication tools
 Result in confusion and eventual abandonment of tools.
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Four Concepts
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Four Concepts
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Will help predict the future success and
failures of future communication tools
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Will help determine what future
communication tools will and will not solve in
the new millennium
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1. Common Grounds
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Common Grounds:
 Knowledge
that participants have in common, and
they are aware they have in common.
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Common Grounds are established through:
 General
knowledge about the person’s background
 Appearance and behavior during interaction
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Establishing Common Grounds
Observe how Miss Dimple is trying to establish an
perspective of what Chico knows.
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Establishing Common Grounds
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Establish and maintaining common grounds
from whatever cues we have at the moment
 Few
cues result in difficulty in creating a common
ground and more misunderstanding
 Misinterpretations requires more work to repair
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Cost of communication
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Factors for Establishing & Maintaining
Common Grounds
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Co-presence: Same physical enviroment
Visibility: visible to each other
Audibility: speech
Contemporality: message receive without delay
Simultaneity: both participant can send and receive
Sequentiality: turns cannot get out of sequence
Reviewability: able to review other’s messages
Revisability: can revise messages before they are sent
- Clark & Brennan
The more factors a communication tool has the easier it is to construct
common grounds with it.
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Factors for Establishing & Maintaining
Common Grounds
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Common Grounds: Collocation Vs.
Remote work
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Collocated Work
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When teams are fully collocated, it is relatively easy to establish
common grounds
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Remote Work
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Experience difficulty establishing common grounds
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Share culture, local context
Difficulty telling who is speaking if you do not know them well
Off hand reference to local events unfamiliar to remote participant makes
them feel even more remote
Lack awareness of coworkers’ mental state
People who have established a lot of common ground can
communicate well even over a limiting medium
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Main Point
The more common grounds people can establish,
the easier the communication, the greater the
productivity.
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2. Coupling in Work
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Coupling: the extent and kind of communication
required by the work.
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Tightly coupled work requires frequent, complex
communication among the group members
 Ambiguous
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work
Loosely couple work requires either less frequent or
less complicated interaction.
 Routine work, fewer dependencies
 Common Grounds on what needs to
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Coupling Characteristics
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The greater the number of participants for a task, the more likely all aspect
of the task are ambiguous.
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Common grounds between all the participants is very small
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Task that are ambiguous is tightly couple until clarification is achieved.
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E.g. Collaborative Design task is tightly coupled, while running a clearly
define test suite is loosely coupled
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Main Point
Design work organization so that ambiguous,
tightly couple work is collocated.
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3. Collaboration Readiness
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Using shared technology assumes that the
coworkers need to share information and are
rewarded for it.
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Collaboration will fail unless it aligns with the
incentive structure.
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Main Point
One should not attempt to introduce groupware
and remote technologies in organizations and
communities that do not have a culture for
sharing and collaboration
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4. Technology Readiness
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Some organizations’ habits and infrastructure are not ready for
adoption of appropriate technologies for distance work.
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How organization may not be ready
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Poor alignment of technology support
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existing patterns of everyday usage
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How to implement email communication when the majority of people have
no PC.
If the organization do not document because it hinders their task data
digitally certainly means they are not ready for a shared tool dealing with
digital documents.
Requirements/prerequisites for a new technology
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Organization that have not adopt email, will not be ready adopter of
NetMeetings
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Technology Readiness Ordering
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Failures often results from attempts to introduce technologies
in the lower half of the list to organization that are not yet
comfortable with technologies in the upper of the list.
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Main Point
Advance technologies should be introduced in
small steps.
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Distance Work in the New
Millennium
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Distance work in the New Millennium
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Ways Communication Technology can
be better than Collocation.
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Although face-to-face interaction is a good comparison for future tools, it is not the
golden rule
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Distance tool may have properties that are better than face-to-face interaction.
Asynchronous nature of computationally-mediated interaction
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Sometime people do not have overlapping time to have extended discussions
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Anonymity
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People are sometime more truthful anonymous than face-to-face
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Discussion Board
Avatars, screen names
Revisability and Reviewability
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Revising you message before you send it
Reviewing other people’s message for clarification
“Beyond Being There” - Hollan & Stornetta
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Distance work in the New Millennium
Several key elements of interactivity will be
resistant to technological support
Common grounds and context
 Differing time zone
 Cultural differences
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Common grounds and Context
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People who are born and reside in entirely different countries will need
extra efforts to establish common grounds
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Local politics
 Sport events
 Holidays
 Social Interchange with locals
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Technology can provide some contextual information, but it cannot
possibly provide information about everything that affects team members
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The bad weather at a remote location cause all the team member there to be
late.
 Street construction cause the power to shutdown, disconnecting the remote site.
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Common grounds help develop trust which have been shown to improve
efficiency and reliability in teams.
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Different Time Zone
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The more time zone you cross, the less the time when people
are at work at the same time.
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Short overlapping work time cause people to rush work during
overlap and delay decision making during non-overlap
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Reducing productivity
During overlap, people at different site is at different part of
the day.
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Sleepy morning workers in one site
Alert late afternoon workers in another
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Culture
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Possibly the single biggest factor that global teams need to
address is cultural differences.
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Teams where participants are from two or more countries have
frequent misunderstandings resulting from cultural differences.
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Examples of cultural differences
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American culture is very task oriented, while Europeans and Asians
values personal relationships and will spend whole meetings socializing
Relationship between managers and direct reports
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European and Asian workers respect authority and do not require
persuasion when given task
In the U.S. there exist less distance between manager and direct report,
they communicates freely
Ways feedback is given
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Attempts to overcome culture barriers
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Global companies are beginning to be populate by
culturally knowledgeable personnel
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During intense interaction or heat of discussion it is
very hard to remain culturally considerate
 People
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tend to revert back to the natural cultural habits
Sensitivity to cultural difference will always take
more effort, not matter the technology
 Cost
of remote work
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Examples of Failures to consider
context, time zone and culture
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Tech talk scheduled between an American professor
in the Netherlands with American Executives
 Scheduled
for 7 p.m. Dutch time (1 p.m. US) on Friday,
May 5
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Company schedule routine conference between US
and French site
 Meeting
held 7:30 am U.S. time (late afternoon French
time) every Friday
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Conclusion
“Although we will be able to bridge some of the
distance and make communication richer for
remote work than it is today, distance still
matters.”
- Olson & Olson
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Questions, comments…
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