Complimenting Invisible Work: Identifying Hidden Employee...

PACMHCI Volume 2, Issue CSCW, Article 96, November 2018

Complimenting Invisible Work: Identifying Hidden Employee Contributions through a Voluntary, Positive, and Open Work Review System

YONG MING KOW, School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong WAIKUEN CHENG, Independent Researcher

Invisible work is an important CSCW research agenda, and also integral to operations within companies. To reveal these hidden practices, studies to date have suggested that companies use IT systems to share location, task progress, and enquiry information among employees, or to conduct research work which identifies informal practices. In this paper, we examine a work review system, in the form of a smartphone app feature, to identify hidden employees’ contributions. This Complimenting Feature, developed in April 2017 by an air cargo handling company in Hong Kong, allows its terminal staff to compliment other employees—anyone they like, and anytime they like. In December 2017, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 19 terminal staff regarding their experiences using the app. Our analysis of the interviews found a wide range of invisible work being identified despite the existence of a similar paper review form. We have also found evidence of increased employees’ motivation and social learning.

CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Collaborative and social computing; Empirical

studies in collaborative and social computing

KEYWORDS

Invisible work, work review, information system, semi-structured interviews.

ACM Reference format:

Yong Ming Kow and Waikuen Cheng. 2018. Complimenting Invisible Work: Identifying Hidden

Employee Contributions through a Voluntary, Positive, and Open Work Review System. Proceedings of

the ACM on Human Computer Interaction (HCI), CSCW, 2, Article 96 (November 2018), 24 pages.

https://doi.org/10.1145/3274365

1 INTRODUCTION

In every organization, work rarely gets done efficiently if every worker only follows

documented procedures. Beyond documented and visible work processes, there exists

invisible work which is developed out of workers’ day-to-day experiences, easily evades

documentation, and is commonly communicated between co-workers privately; while

invisible, it is essential to accomplishing work [27,37]. For example, a company that only

measures its telephone operators by the number of calls they could handle every day may

Author’s addresses: Yong Ming Kow, 18 Tat Hong Ave, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong SAR; Waikuen Cheng, Hong Kong.

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https://doi.org/10.1145/3274365

96

2:CSCW Kow and Cheng


eventually decide to outsource this operation to a cheaper country; but its management may

not know that its local operators had local linguistic knowledge and communication skills

which kept their customers happy [27]. To outsource this operation may eventually reduce

its customers’ satisfaction, resulting in long-term profit loss to the company.

Companies that are aware of their invisible work can avoid accidentally eliminating

important roles during reorganization exercises [9,34,40], or even directly support or reward

employees for their hidden contributions [37,41]. The first step is to identify where such

hidden work practices exist in the company [41]. Since invisible work is often communicated

at a personal level, one promising way to identify such practices is for workers to report the

work themselves [36,37]. While previous studies have commonly suggested conducting

research studies such as ethnography, big data analysis, and social network analysis to

identify invisible work [6,10,46], recent studies with an online community and a corporate

program suggest that a work review system may also be used for such a purpose [17,36]. Thus

we ask the research question: How will employees utilize and experience a corporate work

review system that is designed to identify and support invisible work?

In this study, we examined a Complimenting Feature within an app developed by an air cargo

handling company in Hong Kong, Express (pseudonym). The company has requested that we

anonymize its name. From April 2017, Express introduced to its employees this feature in an

app, allowing its terminal staff to compliment other employees—anyone they like, anytime

they like, and within broad categories approved by the management; namely safety,

cleanliness, team spirit, and mutual respect. This Complimenting Feature was formally

conceived to digitize and complement a formal paper form known as the Feedback Form (FF

Form), commonly filled out by Express supervisors to compliment their subordinates. In

December 2017, we interviewed 19 Express air cargo terminal staff (predominantly ground

and terminal frontline workers and supervisors) regarding their experiences using the app.

These interviews were conducted over two days at Express. Each interview lasted between

20 and 30 minutes. We asked questions including “What are your day-to-day

responsibilities?” “How had you used the Complimenting Feature?” “How had the feature

affected you and your colleagues?” and “How were the compliments different in the app

compared to those in the FF Form?” The interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed in

Cantonese (native Chinese language of Hong Kong) and English, and analyzed for recurring

themes. The employees’ feedback regarding the Complimenting Feature was mostly positive.

We found that the Complimenting Feature could identify forms of invisible work beyond those

reported in the formal paper form. Finally, we discuss benefits and reasons for the

Complimenting Feature’s design success.

2 INVISIBLE WORK WITHIN COMPANIES

Most forms of labor have parts of their work that are invisible to someone [37]. The work of

volunteers of an online community can be invisible to visitors of its websites [5,17,42]. The

work of employees within a company can be invisible to its customers. In this study, we

address a form of invisible work performed by corporate employees but hidden from

Complimenting Invisible Work 2:CSCW


management and other employees. An often cited example is that of nurses whose work

alongside doctors is often overlooked by medical institutions [23,38].

One of the main reasons for the existence of invisible work in companies is in the necessary

use of quantified productivity indicators to improve organizational efficiency [37]. One

purpose of an institution is to socially organize employees so as to efficiently produce

products and services [8]. To serve this end, managers use productivity indicators to limit

workers’ tasks only to those that serve the company’s productivity goals. Star and Strauss

[37] call this “abstracting and indicators manipulation,” and we can call it indicators

manipulation for short. But such indicators are not perfect, and productive work which does

not have unquestionably obvious effects on the indicators often gets ignored and become

invisible. For example, a localized communicative style which telephone operators use to

strike a rapport with customers may be ignored by indicators like “average call duration” [25].

One may question whether management could provide a better set of indicators which more

accurately represent its interests. But even when managers are aware of a work practice, they

may still perceive it as routine or trivial, and thus ignore it [37]. Star and Strauss [37] call this

“background” work. A common case for nurses is that hospitals sometimes do not bother to

train nurses to console patients and make them feel comfortable about their treatment, but

nurses still try their best to develop informal practices of improving patients’ wellbeing at the

hospital [23]. The nurses’ informal practices of caring for patients’ wellbeing may be seen as

what Hochschild [14] calls emotional labor. While such work is important to service

companies, it is also generally underappreciated by management. In another example from a

study of corporate knowledge management repositories, Kayhan and Bhattacherjee [19]

found that in-house experts appointed by the management had tended to ignore

contributions which did not conform to institutional standards, even when they were

practical to employees. Here, formal practices refer to tasks and objectives that management

members discuss in official meetings and record in documents; these practices are generally

standardized into procedures and reflected in productivity measures; whereas informal

practices refer to objectives and practices employees have discovered to be effective through

their day-to-day work experiences, but privately share among co-workers only [37].

There are also times when employees simply do not want the work to be made known to the

managers. Star and Strauss [37] call this “backstage” work. For example, Hutchins [16]

reported that official procedures within the US Navy were presented, in formal records, as a

serially ordered set of tasks; but in practice, many of the tasks were improvised by the sailors,

and performed in no strict ordering and under tight communication and coordination. The

serially ordered tasks are only “rationalized versions [that] are easier to think about,

understand, and promulgate… but it would be both difficult and inefficient to do the job the

way it is described in the written procedures” [16] (p. 290). Thus, backstage work exists to

make reports appear orderly and easy to comprehend during management meetings, which

otherwise a complete disclosure would make frontline work difficult to explain or even open

to scrutiny.



Thus, between visibility and invisibility of work is an “interplay between the formal and the

informal” practices [37] (p. 10). In their day-to-day experiences, co-workers share invisible

practices, and such sharing helps foster trust, personal relationship [5], and tacit

understanding of what makes them feel that their work is unique and meaningful [21,28].

3 IDENTIFYING INVISIBLE WORK THROUGH WORK REVIEW SYSTEMS

Lucy Suchman [41] argues that companies should represent invisible work in their computer

systems in order to more accurately support challenges of coordination and control that

workers face. In studies of hospital orderlies, the use of an institution-wide system displaying

outstanding tasks, task assignments, progress of tasks, and location of these workers helps

nurses coordinate work otherwise invisible to them [38]. Unruh and Pratt [44] suggest that

patients’ efforts to address their own health issues are often invisible to healthcare providers;

these efforts should be made known to healthcare providers, who could then support these

patients in more personal ways. To identify invisible work, research work may be carried out

with analysis of corporate databases to identify new work practices [46], and survey studies

could identify informal social networks within a company [6].

There have been few studies on the use of work reviews to identify invisible work. Irani and

Silberman [17] examined a website, called Turkopticon, that allows Amazon Mechanical Turk

(AMT) workers to review their employers, and openly share their reviews with other

workers. Reviewers rated their employers along four criteria: communicativity, generosity,

fairness, and promptness. Reviewers also need to fill in a text comment to explain their

ratings. To avoid employers’ retribution, Turkopticon allows these reviewers to

pseudonymize their identities. Since AMT does not allow these workers to interact with each

other, the researchers found that such review systems, by openly sharing the review results,

allow the workers to inform each other of potential hazards of their employment [17].

But corporate work reviews, whether conducted in a top-down or bottom-up manner (see

[2,13,31]), have tended to be closed-door and private, in order to avoid the negative reviews

creating embarrassment for the reviewees [43]. Such closed-door reviews limit the utility of

corporate reviews to openly disclose invisible work to subordinates and co-workers. This

issue could be averted, as demonstrated by a study by Smith and Marra [36], by introducing

a positive review only system. Smith and Marra [36] designed an Employee Recognition

Program, which through an institutional website, collected nominations for quarterly awards

to outstanding IT staffs [36]. The award categories include “role model,” “innovator,” and

“outreach.” Three voluntary employees acted as judges for the award nominees, who were

anonymized throughout the judging process. Interestingly, this review process was able to

identify an outstanding awardee whose identity was previously unbeknownst to most of the

management team [36].

The Turkopticon and the Employee Recognition Program suggest that work reviews are a

viable means of allowing workers to reveal invisible work. Also, when corporate social media

users actively participate on the platform, this activity could foster opportunities for

collaboration [7,15,26]. But for corporate work review systems, there are two further issues



which designers have to resolve. One, when these reviews are tied to promotion or pay raise,

they invite employees to abuse them for political purposes [22,35]. Studies of corporate

appraisals have found that supervisors often use positive reviews to inflate the performance

of those whom they want to encourage or promote, and use negative reviews to discourage

those they like to reprimand or dismiss [22,30]. Thus, while work reviews may expose

invisible work, they also challenge designers to consider ways to minimize negative

influences by organizational politics.

Two, workers need to be properly incentivized to engage in using such a work review system.

For example, in the case of the Employee Recognition Program, Smith and Marra [36] found

that the program’s design around quarterly awards seem to attract more reviews of “earth-

shattering accomplishments” but missed many of the mundane but important everyday work

contributions [36]. To engage workers in review of day-to-day activities, more timely

incentives may be given. For example, Scissors, et al. [33] found that timely rewards of

Facebook’s “Like” indicators helped signal social validation and support to users, thus

engaging them to use the platform. Such incentives could also come in forms of social

feedback, such as blog readers acknowledging the work of blog writers [12]. While social

recognition and social feedback are important incentives, Bailey and Horvitz [3] argued that

in corporate settings, most employees may also find financial rewards necessary.

When considering ways to reveal invisible work, Star and Strauss [37] (p. 24) warn that

designers should ask questions of what practices should be made visible; and to whom, when,

and for what reasons it should be visible [29,37]. In the case of corporate systems,

transparency and visibility of some work-related details may harm employees or their

supervisors, and these ought to be carefully considered [29,37]. In addition, appropriate

forms of incentives are necessary to promote worker participation in using the system [3]. To

examine these issues, designers need to experiment with review system designs to identify

features that can reward workers for their invisible contributions without subjecting them to

unnecessary scrutiny and surveillance [29].

4 DESCRIPTION OF THE COMPLIMENTING FEATURE WITHIN THE “EX” APP

4.1 Digitizing workers’ feedback within a smartphone app

Express operates a terminal that handles air cargo at an airport in Hong Kong. Express employs

more than 2000 staff working at the terminal. In one day, Express employees can work in any

of three shifts, with eight hours in each shift covering 24 hours in one day. Shift assignment

changes once every six continuous work days. To help employees keep track of company

activities, including shift assignments, Express has created an app known as EX, which

employees can install and download from the company’s website. Nearly 90% of all Express

employees had installed EX on their personal mobile phones. Air cargo terminal staff, also

known as frontline (“前線”) staff, consisted of workers and their supervisor at the warehouses

and airfield. The frontline staff load and unload cargos from airplanes, and move them in and

out of warehouses. A small number of the frontline staff also perform administrative work

https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hk/%E5%89%8D%E7%B7%9A



including preparation and processing of custom, manifest, and other paperwork with airline

customers.

Our interviewees told us that the management takes the welfare of these frontline workers

seriously; and when the managers receive feedback that the frontline workers were treated

badly, these managers will reprimand their supervisors. Before the launching of the

Complimenting Feature, two feedback mechanisms were available to frontline workers and

supervisors. The first was an app function to send email messages to the company’s

management, which had been used sparingly by the workers and only for submitting

complaints and suggestions on serious matters. The second was a more commonly used

formal paper document known as the FF Form. The purpose of the FF Form was for any staff

to compliment any of their colleagues. We will call a person who makes a compliment a

“praiser,” and a person who receives one a “praisee.” Praisers need to pick up a FF Form from

the human resources department, fill out the form, and submit it to their manager. The

subsequent approval process takes months to complete. When approved, praisees receive

points which contribute to their annual appraisal. While not written in any document, the

general perception from all staff we interviewed was that the FF Form was a formal

paperwork only to be filled out by supervisors, and indeed no frontline worker had ever filled

out a FF Form.

In October 2016, the IT department of Express received an assignment to digitize the FF Form,

and incorporate it within the existing EX app. The second author was the primary designer of

the app in consultation with the first author along with developers from Express IT

department, and initial inputs from department managers and senior managers. Both authors

as well as the developers were Hong Kong residents. In the design of the Complimenting

Feature, the authors incorporated design considerations based on our understanding of use

of peer reviews, appraisals, and invisible work in different kinds of organizations. While the

department managers and senior managers of Express were not aware of the scientific

concept “invisible work,” they were supportive of the designers’ proposition to reward

contributions identified by the workers themselves. During three instances during the design

process, one of the manager also consulted with representatives of a labor union within

Express regarding designs of the submission form (see Fig. 1 (right)). These representatives

spoke on behalf of mostly frontline employees. We understood Express had consulted with

these representatives regarding any policy changes which may impact frontline workers.

While these representatives were not users themselves, their buy-in with the designs was

important to make the app appealing to workers.

In April 2017, the IT department of Express published the Complimenting Feature on the EX

app. This feature was available to all Express employees. In this study, we only focus on

examining the use experiences of the frontline workers and their supervisors. Since most of

the frontline staff were already using the EX app, the Complimenting Feature was accessible

to most of them by navigating from the EX app main menu (see Fig. 1 (left)). In order to

compliment a colleague, the praiser had to take a photograph, video, or audio recording to

indicate the context of the incident, and then input text to describe what was the praisee’s



contribution (see Fig. 1 (right)). To provide timely feedback, the compliment was submitted

to a committee consisting of five rotating managers who were given one week - a much

improved wait time in comparison to the FF Form - to approve or disapprove the submission.

This approval process was communicated to users in promotional videos played on TV

screens in prominent areas within Express, and every worker we had interviewed was aware

of this approval process. Once the compliment had been approved, both the praisee and the

praiser will receive a notification on their EX app. If a submission has been rejected, its praiser

will also receive a notification, but which inform him the rejected reasons including “unclear

photo,” and “others.” With “others,” the committee member will be required to enter texts to

explain her reason in more detail.

Fig. 1. (left) Main menu items on the EX app; (right) design of the submission form used by Express employees to compliment their colleague.

Once a compliment has been approved, both the praiser and the praisee will each receive a

virtual token – the praiser received a star token, and the praisee a heart token (see Fig. 2

(left)). Once a user accumulated one star or five heart tokens, she could visit the human

resources department to redeem a HK$10 meal coupon. Unlike the FF Form, the star or heart

an employee received did not count towards their annual formal appraisal. From April 1,

2017 to July 6, 2018, the system recorded 2877 user login to the EX app, along with 2649

visits to the Complimenting Feature. During this period, a total of 242 star and heart tokens

had been awarded to users.

4.2 Design features: Voluntary, positive, and open review

The design team decided that, like the Turkopticon and the Employee Recognition Program,

uses of the Complimenting Feature should be voluntary. Also, this feature will only allow



positive reviews. This positive review only consideration is in line with some social media

sites – for example, Facebook, in which the “Like” feature allows users to only give “thumbs

up” but not “thumbs down” in reaction to posts. Another consideration for positive-only

review is to avoid creating a negative environment in which criticisms may be used to harm

colleagues. Both voluntary and positive work review design were easy to implement since the

FF Form had also contained these features.

Fig. 2. (left) Once a compliment has been approved by the managers, the praiser will receive a “heart” token, and the praisee will receive a “star” token; (right) a Leadership Board within the Complimenting

Feature showing a list of top praisees.

With the FF Form, only the praiser and praisee get to know about the positive feedback. The

Complimenting Feature departed from this design of the FF Form by making the approved

compliments visible to all users. Within the feature was a Leadership Board (“龍虎榜”) which

presented a list of top praisees, ranked according to the number of compliments a praisee has

received (see Fig. 2 (right)). The idea of having a leadership board came from the second

author who believed that this will serve to promote a positive culture in which workers are

quick to compliment one another. We also believed that this design will help to make the

Complimenting Feature more social and interactive to users.

In sum, the design of the Complimenting Feature aims to supplement and improve upon the

FF Form. The FF Form remained in use during our study. In the Complimenting Feature, its key

design retained FF Form’s function of accepting voluntary and positive review, while departed

from the FF Form by being smartphone based, having a shorter approval wait time, providing

a small incentive to praisers and praisees, and providing a Leadership Board to make

approved compliments visible to all users.

http://www.rthk.hk/radio/radio2/programme/chinesepopchart



5 METHOD

We evaluated the design of the Complimenting Feature through one-to-one interviews with

19 Express employees. The interviews were arranged jointly by the human resources

department, the information technology department, and the operation department of

Express, and were conducted over two days in a meeting room at the terminal.

Participants and Recruitment

In December 2017, the two authors, with the help of a research assistant from a local

university, conducted one-to-one semi-structured interviews with 19 Express frontline

workers and supervisors. The Express management requested that our research focuses on

the frontline staffs. In early October 2017, we requested permission to conduct four

interviews per day spreading over four to five separate days. The process to obtain

permission from Express management to conduct the interviews took about one and a half

months. At the end of November 2017, we were informed by the operation department, due

to schedule constraints, that a group of 19 interviewees were available for interview in the

week of early December 2017, but only over two days. At this point, we decided to semi-

structure the interviews to focus on the most important questions.

These 19 interviewees included 11 frontline workers and eight supervisors who were users

of the Complimentary Feature. Initially, the IT department generated the list of all the

participants of the Complimenting Feature, including both praisers and praisees, who were

also frontline staffs. The IT department passed on this list to the operation department, that

worked with section supervisors and managers to identify participants who were working

day shift on the days of the interviews. These section supervisors and managers approved the

final list of interviewees. We were told that this process was otherwise random – that no

special consideration was given to the selected interviewees apart from their availability. Of

these 19 interviewees, 14 were male, and five were female; 18 of them had the experience of

either praising others (4) or being praised by others (14), while one had the experience of

both. Our interviewees had working experience at Express ranging between 3 and 23 years,

with an average experience of 13.7 years with the company. We interpreted this level of

experience among our interviewees as partly reflecting Express’ high employees’ retention

rate, and also the presence of many supervisors among our interviewees. Our interviews were

conducted during the interviewees’ work hours, and our interviewees did not receive

remuneration for their participation in this study.

The work of air cargo terminal staff is to ensure that the correct cargo is loaded and unloaded

on and off airplanes. The staff were divided into different sections within the company, and

each section may be further divided into teams. Within each team there are both workers and

supervisors. Specifically, a ground handling section takes care of loading and unloading cargo

on and off airplanes. It also takes charge of receiving and moving the unloaded cargo to the

warehouse, and delivering cargo to the right airplane according to schedule. A special

handling team is part of the ground handling section, except that it handles cargo that requires

greater care due to factors such as being oversized. A terminal service section unpacks cargo

into loose packages for easy storage and retrieval by customers; such a section also packs



packages (e.g., individual boxes) into cargo that is shaped to fit the airplane’s capacity. Within

the terminal service section, there are administrative teams which communicate with

customers and process their paperwork such as custom forms and manifests. Due to the work

of each team and section being interconnected, collaborative work is an important element of

air terminal staff. For example, when one team becomes overwhelmed by a surge of workload,

it is common for managers and supervisors to temporarily reassign workers to support the

busy team.

Due to the scheduling constraint at Express, we decided to focus the interviews on the most

important questions. Originally, we had wanted to start off each interview with a day-in-the-

life question to obtain a greater detail of the interviewees’ routine and work culture. But to fit

up to 10 interviews in one day, we decided to only quickly touch on their general job role, and

thereafter ask about the Complimenting Feature. Naturally, many unique terminologies, work

roles, and processes used only locally within Express had emerged, which we had no time to

explore in detail. Since the interviews were recorded, we were able to consult with our liaison

at the IT department from time to time. We used these opportunities to clarify these unique

terminologies. We had also discussed with our liaison in detail to deepen our understanding

of the interviewees’ team structure and processes defining each job role. All 19 interviews

were conducted in person. Each of the interviews lasted between 20 to 30 minutes. We asked

questions including: “What do you do?” “Who do you work with every day?” “How do you feel

about praising (or being praised by) others?” “How do you think things will be different if this

feature does not exist?” “Have you claimed your rewards? And why? (if applicable)” “What

improvement would you like to see in the Complimenting Feature?” These questions were

designed to inquire into the relations between the interviewees’ daily work and their

experiences using of the Complimenting Feature.

Data Analysis

We conducted 18 interviews in Cantonese, the native Chinese language of Hong Kong, and

one in Mandarin. Both the authors and the research assistant participated in conducting the

interviews. All interviews were audio-recorded. The second author and the research assistant

transcribed the recordings in the same language, and then translated the transcriptions into

English. In this process, all interviewees’ names were anonymized and replaced with

pseudonyms (i.e., S1, S2, and so forth). The coding process was initiated when interviews

commenced, and continued after each interview. Within the schedule that the operation

department had given us, both authors and the research assistant had about 10 minutes

between interviews to discuss emerging themes. We kept track of the codes that were

emerging so as to adjust our interview questions accordingly. For example, we did not

prepare questions about the Leadership Board, but realized that users were observing this

representation to find out which of their colleagues were praised. Subsequently, we made

sure to ask this question in the interviews. We also learned about ways in which the

interviewees were excited that they could praise their superiors, peers, and colleagues in a

different team. They described tasks which they felt were important but were impossible to

report previously. It is through this process that themes of invisible work emerge and

crystallize.



After the interviews, both authors conducted a grounded theory-based analysis of our

interview transcripts using coding and memoing [39]. The authors met twice to iteratively

identify, name, and categorize forms of invisible work and other phenomena observed in the

transcripts. In these meetings, we discussed the experience of our interviewees, the design of

the Complimenting Feature, and important themes which emerged. We reduced the codes

using axial coding until the key themes emerged. In order to validate these findings, we

submitted a report to Express IT department managers and senior managers in February

2018, utilizing similar themes and quotes presented in this paper; these management

members were excited by our findings and approved further development and promotion of

the Complimenting Feature within Express. In the next section, we present these key themes

which we found in our analysis.

6 IDENTIFYING AND REWARDING HIDDEN CONTRIBUTIONS

In this section, we describe the staff’s hidden contributions that were revealed by the users

of the Complimenting Feature. We also describe the benefits of revealing these contributions,

and issues of conflicting perspectives of what is worth complimenting.

6.1 Revealing hidden contributions

Our interviewees mentioned three criteria for a contribution to pass the bar for inclusion in

the FF Form. One, the contribution helps avert a plane delay. Two, the contribution prevents

damage to the plane’s body. Three, the contribution leads to the company receiving a

complimentary letter or email from a client. The bar to pass the FF Form criteria eliminates

contributions which do not have direct and immediate impact on the company’s bottom line.

Before the Complimenting Feature, contributions that were not entered into the FF Form were

acknowledged, but only privately. For example, a colleague may give words of thanks, such as

“okay, good, done” (“嘩，ok，掂”), or “couldn’t have done it without you.” However, these kind

words were often private interactions which remained hidden and forgotten after the fact.

For this reason, our interviewees loved the way the Complimenting Feature captured this form

of compliment in more visible ways.

Table 1 shows some of the compliments submitted by the employees. These compliments

correspond to the interviewees whose quotes were used in this paper.

Table 1. A list of compliments submitted by the Complimenting Feature users.

Interviewee Role The Compliments (edited to remove privacy information)

S01/S18 Praisee “When moving cargo though the airplane, one piece of cargo was

only a few inches smaller than the size of the cabin door. This was a

difficult job to handle. Under [S01]’s leadership, the team safely

unloaded the piece of cargo. Their team remained to complete their

tasks beyond their work hours.”



S16 Praisee “[S16] has always been well loved by colleagues. She takes her work

seriously. Furthermore, she prepared mango pudding for us today

to motivate us! Like!”

S12 Praisee “On October 14, 2017, right before the typhoon warning was raised,

we needed to retrieve several pieces of heavy imports. This required

a heavy crane truck. [S12] patiently took several trips to retrieve the

imports in time for the customers. His professionalism is worth our

praise.”

S13 Praiser “We received a piece a cargo which, due to it having been badly

built-up, was not sitting firmly on the palette. But the client airline

wanted this cargo on the plane on August 9 [the next day]… The

three experienced staff took much time to discuss mitigating

strategies [to fulfill the customer’s needs]. This is a great example of

teamwork that is worth complimenting.”

S19 Praisee “The company’s van broke down. He helped to push it back to the

safety zone.”

S20 Praiser “On the first day after the typhoon, the flight schedule was especially

busy. [S20] sacrificed his own meal time to volunteer bringing

drinks to his co-workers working in unbearably hot weather.”

S14 Praisee “This employee and his partner identified a piece of goods as under

a certain hazard category, but without its required label. Also,

hazardous goods need to be reported and examined before loading

onto the airplane. They reported to their superior immediately and

averted a [potential] accident.”

The reported incidents varied from those that impact customers directly (e.g., S01 and S18),

to acts of friendliness such as bringing a mango pudding to co-workers (e.g., S16). Some of

these contributions, such as acts of friendliness, could not have been reported in the old paper

form since they were enacted by a supervisor to workers, or in a peer-to-peer manner.

Exposing contributions from supervisors to subordinates. Since the FF Form had to be filled

in by supervisors, supervisors themselves seldom receive compliments from subordinates. In

his case, S01, with 20 years in the company, and a supervisor of a special handling team, was

happy to get complimented. He said:

It is better to have more channels to compliment [others]. Such as you do not have to be

an airline, or to be a supervisor to be able to praise your colleagues. Even those who are

relatively [low rank], whom we called “Lo Ware” (“老 ware” or warehouse workers), or

those “Che Tau” (“車頭” or drivers), if they think their supervisors did well, they could also

pass a compliment through the app. Because in the past, it’s usually the airline or

superiors who initiated a compliment, but rarely a subordinate who praised a superior,

because if he is a subordinate he had no way to do so. But now we have a channel to do

this.



The feature allows supervisors to feel appreciated by their subordinates, which had not

happened previously through the FF Form.

Exposing peer to peer contributions. Employees had also used the Complimenting Feature

to praise their peers for a job well done. S16, an administrator who checked manifests, with

16 years at Express, told us that she appreciated that she could compliment anyone who did

well:

From my knowledge, there’s no online complimenting before, so they made one online.

Complimenting colleagues is a good thing. So even peers could compliment each other,

not just supervisors. Because of this [FF] Form, praisers tended to also be superiors... So

this feature allows those of the same grade to also do so.

There were some workers, like S14, 17 years in the company and worked at a terminal service

section, had few experiences being praised by his supervisor, who was perhaps more

demanding in comparison to other supervisors:

Interviewer: Besides the app and this case, had there been an instance where the

supervisor told you that you did well?

S14: No, supervisors won’t

Interviewer: Like not even verbally?

S14: Nah, those supervisors won’t

Interviewer: Ok

S14: Supervisors rarely rarely do [praise you].

Users like S16 and S14 welcome the ability to praise their peers, and for themselves - to feel

appreciated more often for their contributions to the company.

Exposing contributions across sections/departments. In corporate appraisals, employees

are often only assessed for their contribution within their own department. This form of

appraisal tends to overlook help an employee has rendered to colleagues of other teams; but

the Complimenting Feature exposed some of these contributions. One such inter-

departmental collaborative practice that was often mentioned was “lai foo” (“拉夫”), used

among employees at Express to mean temporary reassignment of a staff to a different team.

In the Chinese language, the literal meaning of “lai foo” is the forcing of civilians to perform

involuntary labor for the military. And among Hong Kong people, “lai foo” (as in “臨時拉夫”) is

figuratively used to refer to a sudden request for someone to do a task which he or she did

not expect. For example, S12, who operated a forklift, and worked 16 years at Express, was



“lai foo” to assist colleagues of a different section with a forklift when a typhoon warning was

raised. He said:

S12: Oh yes, I often get [“lai foo”]. But I am here for many years and have worked in quite

a number of different roles.

Interviewer: Because you are familiar [with the roles]?

S12: I am familiar and some supervisors know that, they will ask me to help with “lai foo.”

Interviewer: Are there people who would not get assigned to “lai foo?” Are you simply

more agreeable?

S12: I don’t mind as I know how to do the work. But some other people would take it to

heart. They would feel that you were always approaching them and would feel unhappy. Interviewer: Is it because other colleagues are not familiar with the job role, so they are

uncomfortable doing it?

S12: Some of them are. But some of them are not. Some of them think that it is wrong to

keep approaching them.

S12 told us that in the past, “nothing happens” after “lai foo,” that is, he was not rewarded in

any way. While he had always obliged to being “lai foo,” such activities were never reported

or documented, and few others knew about his additional work. But with the new feature, he

said that now more people get to know “after you have done something good.” At Express, “lai

foo” was beyond the formal job scope of employees. As such, some employees perceived that

it was not their job. This made helpful employees like S12 unique, valuable, and deserving of

recognition. Compliments such as this exposed collaboration between supervisors and

subordinates, between peers, and across teams which may otherwise go unnoticed.

6.2 Benefits of revealing hidden contributions

The Complimenting Feature brought benefits by bringing work satisfaction to praisees,

publicizing and promoting good practices, and to directly notifying the management

regarding hidden practices.

Notification brings pride to praisees. Several interviewees mentioned they had little time to

use the feature at all, even though nearly all interviewees had used the EX app on a daily basis

to check their work schedule. It was mostly during these instances, when they looked at their

schedule, that the praisees first saw notifications that they had been complimented. Nearly

all praisees expressed a sense of excitement and appreciation when they saw notifications

that they were praised. For example, S16 said:



I saw [the notification] and I think it’s pretty good. [It happened] when I was working

hard, when everybody was very busy, and suddenly, I saw a praise. [And it happened]

when I felt dull and bored with my work, and this notification appeared unexpectedly.

Oh, that’s pretty interesting… I felt like I did well in my work.

According to some of our interviewees, the FF Form approval process took a long time, and

during this period, both the supervisor and the employee would not receive any feedback

regarding its progress. For example, S13, a service terminal supervisor who had spent 23

years with the company, had praised his workers who had skipped lunch to work through the

entire shift due to manpower shortage and the sudden arrival of an unexpected volume of

cargo. S13 told us that:

If their physical conditions can sustain that work load, I had arranged for them to take

their meal after they were off work. I think that such colleagues [who were willing to go

the extra mile to ensure that work got done] were rare, and not many people were willing

to do so. They were worth complimenting.

S13 had submitted six or more FF Forms in the past, and he compared the app feature to the

FF Form:

[When we used the FF Form] we received no feedback. We did not know whether the

form had been approved or rejected. However, if I used EX app to compliment my peers,

I can see feedback. If the case was approved, the app will send us a message to notify me.

That’s what happened.

Such a short feedback cycle and pleasant surprises help fuel praisees’ motivation to continue

working in the best interest of their colleagues and the company. But according to some of

our interviewees, the one-week approval time remained a little too long. The reason was that

compliments are motivating only if they are given shortly after the incident. Currently, the

wait time was unevenly distributed between one day and a week (depending on the manager

performing the approval).

Leadership Board publicized and promoted good practices. The Leadership Board

displayed top praisees. Even for users who were busy, they could simply pay attention to the

Leadership Board to see who had been complimented, and for what reason they had been

complimented. In doing so, some users saw that the Leadership Board was in fact publicizing

good practices. For example, S19, 4 years with the company, who loaded and unloaded cargo

at the ramp of the airplane as a ground handler, told us:

If there is rubbish on the airfield, such as in the case of cargo flight, even for the passenger

flight, the rubbish will affect the safety of the flight. Rubbish can get into the plane engine.

The colleague who picked up the rubbish definitely deserved a compliment. [Even] if the

flight was [only] delayed from taking off, it would also have a very negative impact. What



I saw so far, those compliments could serve as warnings for others, and make them pay

more attention to safety issues.

S20 provided a complementary statement that such publicity was promoting reciprocity of

good practices. He said:

Or we can put it like this: if a guy is browsing the app, then he knows, oh, this guy got

praised, then that’s pretty good, and we put out cases that are specifically praiseworthy.

Then we can post it on the notice board so that other people know and share the case to

them. Then everybody’s like, oh, this company is full of positivity (“正面”). There are many

things that are praiseworthy, and many people are praising others. So [this guy] will

imitate, or... yeah, yeah, like following what they were doing, just like that…. There are

some workers like, oh, he, it’s simple, you are ground handler and I am also a ground

handler, why did he get praised? Then he will probably check what is going on.

This publicity may have an additional effect of increasing the sense of collegiality among

employees, as S16 mentioned:

Yes, I want to get to know these colleagues, or else I would never know they existed.

2000 employees [at Express]! Now I can depend on the app, and look at it once in a while.

Then there may be a chance I will get to know these colleagues. Even though I do not

have a chance right now, this does not mean I will not be working with them in the future.

Primarily, the users had watched the Leadership Board out of curiosity—who were

complimented, and why they were complimented. However, these interviewees saw the

unexpected benefit of this action creating “positivity” in the work environment, and

mediating a cycle of workers reciprocating good practices towards each other.

We asked interviewees if they had picked up their vouchers. It turned out none of them did.

When we asked why they did not redeem their rewards, the most common response was

confusion regarding ways of redeeming the voucher, and also the time they had to put into

visiting the human resources department in exchange for a HK$10 (~US$1.30) voucher.

When we asked for an ideal amount for such a reward, they mentioned that the reward

needed to be tangible and immediately usable. In this regard, S14 asked for HK$50

(~US$6.40) vouchers, while S18, a supervisor working with a special handling team who had

spent 16 years with the company, said, “I feel like 10 or 8HKD (cash) isn’t too outrageous. I

mean – you don’t get praised every day, right?”

Compliments online provide a direct line of feedback to the company’s management.

Large firms like Express are commonly structured as a multi-layer hierarchy, so its feedback

channels which move from one layer to another may sometimes distort information which

originated from ground-level staff. S18 had this to say in our interview:



S18: Why? If for every frontline worker who gives feedback, and we have to convey them

upwards layer by layer, then it will be very slow.

Researcher: Oh, layer by layer?

S18: Yeah, if he tells me, I tell my boss, and my boss tells his boss, I don’t know how long

will it take to fix the problem. And maybe when it reaches the executives the thing will

be distorted. Maybe the truth, the thing they demand is distorted. But now we can

directly let the COO know.

Researcher: But the app is an open platform that everyone can see the same thing, the

same message.

S18: Yes.

Similarly, S08, a ground handing supervisor, who worked 11 years at Express, told us:

S08：[T]he rewards are beside the point… so long as our executives know that we poured

our “sweat and blood” (“博了命，賣力了”) [into this job]. [Also] by complimenting my own

subordinates, not us [supervisors] in particular, they could work harder for us the next

time, and help us complete the job.

Interviewer：When you said “executives,” how high above you in rank are you talking

about?

S08：Higher than my own boss [laugh]. Level four or above! I am level two. My boss is

level three.

Currently, how the management at Express may make use of this information was out of the

scope of our study. However, along with the ways S18 and S08 were happy that the

Complimenting Feature was able to increase visibility of their teams’ effort to the management.

6.3 Conflicting perspectives of what constitutes legitimate contributions

A clear definition of what constitutes a contribution is needed in order to standardize the

approval process. But since the compliments emerged bottom-up based on individual

employees’ experience, everyone may have a different idea of what counts as a praiseworthy

contribution.

To our interviewees, it was clear that contributions that can be entered into the FF Form were

not disputed by interviewees as legitimate contributions in the Complimenting Feature. This

includes any contribution that prevents a plane delay or damage, and delights the customer.



Also, contributions that include experienced employees teaching or mentoring less

experienced employees, and in the process providing clear and useful instructions, were also

undisputed in our interviews. For example, S17, 17 years in the company, who received cargo

in the warehouse, complimented her trainer who instructed her on forklift operations. She

described her instructor as “really patient to [us] who were just a blank piece of paper.”

However, contributions which include doing work few wanted to do seem to invite suspicion

among interviewees. This includes the contentious compliment of “picking up trash.” For

example, S07, who spent 7 years in the company and worked with a terminal service section,

complained that “everything could be submitted to EX… even like picking trash, and you got

praised for this. I don’t even know if it was real.” However, we may consider alternate views

such as those of S14, who was also with a different terminal service section, and said that

picking up trash was taken for granted by some colleagues; few actually did so regularly:

Yeah, yeah. Like sometimes at my work place there are many plastic wraps or cardboard

cylinders. Sometimes when we were working we could step on the wrap and slip. This

caused many work accidents. But when it was me working I will return [the wraps] to the

right places, so it won’t affect my colleagues… But some people would just leave the

wraps [at dangerous places]. It is useless if it was only me doing this. You need to have

everybody do this. Like there are so many people working in the third [and] fourth floor.

From S14’s personal experience, few employees in his section had bothered to routinely

perform this safety practice. The observation that some important practices, while simple to

perform, were considered menial among many staff corroborated S12’s statement regarding

“lai foo,” and S19’s statement about picking up trash at the airfield. Despite being personally

important, some reviews will not be seen as equally legitimate by every staff member. This

creates a design question of how to formalize informal compliments within an organization.

7 DISCUSSION

With regard to Star and Strauss’ [37] question of what invisible work practices should be

made visible, the Complimenting Feature chose the novel design of revealing voluntary and

positive reviews among employees, and to make these reviews openly visible to all app users.

Building on previous studies of similar systems [17,36], we found further evidence that such

a voluntary and open work review system is able to identify workers’ day-to-day and

mundane contributions, including those from supervisors towards their workers and vice

versa, from workers towards other workers, and to colleagues in a different section of the

company. The formalization of these contributions as representations within a mobile app

also motivates praisees and may mediate social learning among users. But there are issues of

legitimizing informal practices within a formal organization and privacy concerns which

designers need to resolve. In this section, we will discuss this review system and its successes

and challenges, and also suggest how researchers and designers of corporate systems can

leverage our findings in identifying invisible work.

7.1 Invisible work identified through voluntary, positive, and open work reviews



The invisible work complimented by our interviewees was in line with forms of work

described in previous studies [27,37], which include practices of supportive supervisors, and

work that management has taken for granted. As our interviewees commented, supervisors

had never received positive feedback from their workers before – for example, S01, who felt

the need for having more forms of feedback channels. Invisible work such as that mentioned

by S01 was previously hidden at Express by what Star and Strauss [37] call indicator

manipulation. In our study, indicator manipulation was embodied in the use of the FF Form,

which was limited to a supervisor complimenting a subordinate and only under pretext of

financial impact to the company (e.g., averting physical damage to the airplane). By working

around these limitations, the Complimenting Feature opens up new channels of feedback to

uncover practices which would not be reported previously. For these reasons, nearly all our

interviewees were excited about the Complimenting Feature. In studies of invisible work, non-

persons refer to people who are seen as lower class, socially discriminated, and ignored (e.g.,

slaves, servants, and manual labors); as such, the work of non-persons are often taken for

granted and become invisible [27,29]. In our study, even though we found lower ranked

workers, called “Lo Ware” or “Che Tau,” they were not explicitly ignored, and S01 was happy

to be able to receive their feedback. This was perhaps due to how the Express management

was already supportive of their frontline workers (i.e., by allowing them to make complains

through emails).

In most organizations, work that is performed across departments, and requires

improvisation and articulation, is very likely to become invisible [23,32], but the

Complimenting Feature was able to identify this type of work. At Express, many workers were

unhappy to receive “lai foo,” which was thankless work clearly outside of their job scope.

There were a few, like S12, who did not mind “lai foo,” and such workers who went above and

beyond can become more visible within the company. Another example of thankless work

includes that of the emotional labor of an employee caring for her co-workers (e.g., bringing

them drinks – S20).

7.2 Revealing invisible work as motivators and mediators of social learning

In our study, we found that the positive and open reviews not only revealed invisible work,

but also motivated employees to take initiative and may mediate social learning.

By allowing only positive feedback (i.e., compliments), the designers can avoid pitfalls of

negative criticism damaging collegial relationship between employees. After seeing positive

reviews of other colleagues, users like S16 can look forward to “working with them in the

future.” In comparison, previous design of work review systems like the Turkopticon elicited

both positive and negative feedback about AMT employers. While this helped workers avert

potential hazards of their employment, the Turkopticon had to be designed as an anonymous

system for fear of employers’ retribution [17]. But anonymous persons cannot be rewarded

and recognized openly by a company. Thus anonymity eliminates opportunities for workers

to reveal who they are and to leverage their reputation to work with new colleagues. The

Complimenting Feature’s choice of eliciting positive and open reviews had identified other

beneficial effects.



First, our interviewees found the experience motivating and collegial. S16 said “I felt like I did

well in my work.” Apart from the pleasant surprise of being complimented on something

unexpected, two other reasons for feeling motivated were that the praisers and praisees were

able to see the compliment while the event was fresh in their memory, and also that their co-

workers were able to see their compliments on the Leadership Board. This latter design

feature contrasted with common corporate appraisal systems, in which results were only

made known to the direct employees and their supervisors. By receiving fast feedback and

seeing the results published openly, the employees may thus receive social validation and

better sense of social support over their own initiatives (see [33]). Through this process, even

work not known to the managers (but witnessed by co-workers) could get recognized.

Second, the sense that there are colleagues who are putting in additional efforts in their work

may inspire social learning. S20 described her growing sense of “positivity” at the company

after seeing so many colleagues complimenting each other. One way in which compliments

may inspire learning is when users began to imitate positive work practices. For example, S19

suggested that the compliments may help remind users of the importance of taking safety

measures. Another way in which compliments may inspire learning is by motivating others

to do likewise or even better. Such social comparison is also an important aspect of pre-

industrial gift economies [24]. Mauss [24] (p. 95) describes a gift hierarchy in some tribal

villages:

Between chiefs and their vassals, between vassals and their tenants, through such gifts a

hierarchy is established. To give is to show one’s superiority, to be more, to be higher in

rank, magister. To accept without giving in return, or without giving more back, is to

become client and servant, to become small, to fall lower (minister).

We argue that users who saw that their co-workers were publicized by the app felt a similar

obligation to reciprocate contributions. For example, S20 suggested that one effect of

publicizing the compliments is to invite the other workers to reflect on how they could do

better, “Why did he get praised (but not me)?” In many ways, these comments suggest that

the positive and open feedback invites users to participate in a social process of peer

recognition, comparison, competition, and learning often seen in practices of online

communities [18,20].

In comparison with the CSCW social learning concept, situated learning [21], the form of

learning we observed did not go as far as users developing a community of practice. However,

our interviewees’ objects of learning, like those of a community of practice, are unmistakably

informal and situated. For example, S13’s workers who skipped lunch to ensure timely

delivery to their customers did not adhere to formal procedure but adapted to a contingency

situation. Another characteristic of situated and informal learning is that their learning intent

arose voluntarily [11]. And with the Complimenting Feature, employees’ learning motivation

came from a self-driven desire to learn after seeing good performers being commended

publicly and openly. In comparison, formal review mechanisms used in companies have



tended to use negative reviews, or criticisms, to forcefully set learning goals for their

employees – so that the learning intent was imposed on them [43]. In other words, revealing

informal practices may help support situated learning among employees.

Thus, revealing positive and hidden work practices can be more than just revealing unsung

labor and heroes at a workplace; it may establish trust and social relationship, and create

admiration and competition, which help make up the fabric of social learning. From the ways

our interviewees cared about the compliments, we argue that this design mediates

development of a social system centered around collaborative work (e.g., teaching a

newcomer, or working tirelessly alongside co-workers), and may foster inter-departmental

collaboration [7,15,26].

7.3 Legitimizing invisible work through voluntary disclosure

The work review system publicized positive and informal discourses (e.g., a quick word of

thanks) surrounding hidden practices which may encourage social comparison and learning.

But while this informal review system appears to provide benefits to a company, two

questions remain. One, informal practices can be a contentious topic within formal and

bureaucratic organization. Thus, how can this informal review system be legitimized, or kept

separated from formal processes, within a bureaucratic organization? Two, with rapid

development of networked technologies in companies, there are growing concern that forms

of electronic monitoring systems could infringe on workers’ privacy [1,4]. Thus, how could a

work review system be designed to address this concern?

To address the first question, the Express management has chosen not to include compliments

received by praisees on the Complimenting Feature in their annual review. This exclusion of

informal compliments from annual reviews thus separate informal and formal review

systems. We believe that this also helps prevent the Complimenting Feature from being

abused (as is often the case of formal appraisals) to further political agenda within the

company. For example, employees could abuse the system by colluding and giving favorable

reviews to their close friends [30]. Rather, praisees (and also praisers) were rewarded with a

small token voucher for their contribution and involvement. And the positive reviews can still

complement formal appraisals - which collect constructive criticism. Upon receiving a

compliment, our interviewees suggested that only a small and easy to redeem token reward

is necessary and appropriate, and we perceived the reason being that this app was operating

in a corporate setting [3] – and the token reward was serving as an official acknowledgment

from the company and formal closure to the review. Note that interviewees like S14 had

suggested the current reward amount was too small, which led us to suggest that the amount

should not be seen as trivial by users or these compliments may be perceived as less

meaningful than they deserve.

To address the second concern, CSCW is indeed seeing more studies making use of potentially

invasive data collection through devices such as video surveillance, smartphone monitoring,

GPS, and social media to surveil workers [38,46]. This presents an ethical dilemma to

designers, as West and Bowman [45] argued, from an ethical perspective, that while workers



do not want these technologies to be used to incite fear, distrust, anxiety, and hostility at their

workplaces (see also [1]), they do want their successes and good performance to be collected

and documented. West and Bowman’s [45] argument is much in line with Star and Strauss’s

[37] stance – that some invisible work practices are meant to be invisible, which the

management should not aim to collect – and there are others which workers want to be made

visible. The use of voluntary disclosure in the Complimenting Feature may have allowed the

workers to selectively publicize only the successes and good performances which they feel

appropriate to be made known to others. This provides one explanation why we did not hear

privacy concerns raised by the workers during our interviews. This workers’ control over

why, what, and how technologies collect and process data may thus be critical in informing

the ethical design of such work review systems.

Allowing employees to choose whose contribution they like to compliment has another

advantage of referring to praisers’ local expertise in determining the true (situated) value of

a work practice. Unavoidably, when invisible work surfaces as a compliment, other employees

from a different team may find the review incredulous. But the nature of invisible work is

such that its value is only known to workers who are in the thick of action. For example, it

may be the rarity of certain practices within a local team that makes the work, as mundane as

it seems, valuable. Thus, voluntary participation avoids revealing backstage work and

promotes local practices which help maintain what Star and Strauss describe as “arenas of

voices” within the company. The compliments displayed within the information system thus

help amplify these “voices.”

8 CONCLUSION

In this study, we examined the work review feature of a corporate app used by employees of

an air cargo handling company based in Hong Kong. The feature contained unique design

considerations commonly seen in social media which include accepting voluntary and

positive feedback (i.e., compliments), and openly publishing reviews to all users via a

leadership board. We interviewed 19 air cargo terminal staff regarding their use experiences.

We found that the positive and open work review system was able to identify invisible

employee contributions including those from supervisors towards their workers and vice

versa, from workers towards other workers, and to colleagues from a different team. Upon

seeing so many of their colleagues engaging in positive practices, our interviewees found the

experience motivating and collegial. From our interviews, there was evidence that this feature

was able to mediate self-driven desire to learn from good practices published on the app

feature. One issue was that some employees disputed the legitimacy of some of the positive

reviews, which raises questions of how could or should invisible work be legitimized, and

what kind? We argue that this is a classic problem in designing to reveal invisible work and

suggest ways to strike a balance between formal and informal practices. We end the paper

with a discussion of ethical and privacy issues concerning electronic data collection of

invisible work practices.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS



We thank the human resources department, information technology department, and

operation department of the company for their generous help in arranging the interviews

within the staff’ work hours. We also would like to thank all the interviewees for sharing their

experiences with us.

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