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Distance Matters 1 Distance Matters Gary Olson & Judith Olson Hy Loc.

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Distance Matters 1 Distance Matters Gary Olson & Judith Olson Hy Loc
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Page 1: Distance Matters 1 Distance Matters Gary Olson & Judith Olson Hy Loc.

Distance Matters 1

Distance MattersGary Olson & Judith Olson

Hy Loc

Page 2: Distance Matters 1 Distance Matters Gary Olson & Judith Olson Hy Loc.

Distance Matters 2

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 Location

Coworkers’ workspaces are a short distance away from each other “Short” No greater than 30 meters

Common space Used for group interaction Maybe work related interaction or otherwise E.g. meeting rooms, lounges, hallways

Shared Artifacts Object used by all group member to facilitate work E.g. displays, files, references

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Collocated Work Defined

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

Fluidity of participation 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 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 Spatiality of Human Interaction

Allow for reference by pointing to a specific artifact Deictic reference

“that component”, “this part”, “modification here” Engineers holding meeting in front of design mounted on a wall

Air board describing complex idea by drawing in the air by hand and referencing it

Spatial location of artifacts and members may contain information

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

Rapid Feedback 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

Personal Information Background of the source/person is known, will provide context to the

message. Nuanced Information

Small differences of meaning can be conveyed Shared Local Context

Participant have similar situation (time of day, local events) Allows for easy socializing

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Collocated Key Characteristics

Informal Hall Time Impromptu interactions Provides for opportunistic information exchange and social bonding

Co-references Ease of establishing joint reference to objects Gaze and gesture help explains deictic terms

Individual controls Easily change focus of attention Able to quickly tell how all the participant is reacting to whatever is going on

Implicit Cues Cues of what is going on in the periphery Important Contextual information

Spatiality of reference People and work objects are located in space People and idea can be referred to spatially

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Collocated Results

Double the output per unit of staff time compared to the corporate average

Reduce total time to market by two thirds

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Remote Work

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Remote Work Coworkers are located in different location and

physically unreachable

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

Quality of communication over audio and video conferences Who is talking? What is being referenced? Difficult to set up and control.

Using the wrong medium to communicate with each other Tacit acceptance of the communication shortcomings without actively

considering other communication tools

New behaviors emerge to compensate for communication shortcomings Discourse rules, turn taking protocol, etc…

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Remote Work – Communication Tools Failures Failure: No Motivation

People don’t want to share data because they work in an environment where they are compensated for their knowledge

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

Will help predict the future success and failures of future communication tools

Will help determine what future communication tools will and will not solve in the new millennium

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1. Common Grounds

Common Grounds: Knowledge that participants have in common, and

they are aware they have in common.

Common Grounds are established through: General knowledge about the person’s backgroundAppearance 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

Establish and maintaining common grounds from whatever cues we have at the momentFew cues result in difficulty in creating a common

ground and more misunderstandingMisinterpretations requires more work to repair

Cost of communication

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Factors for Establishing & Maintaining Common Grounds 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 Collocated Work

When teams are fully collocated, it is relatively easy to establish common grounds

Share culture, local context

Remote Work Experience difficulty establishing common grounds

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

Coupling: the extent and kind of communication required by the work.

Tightly coupled work requires frequent, complex communication among the group members Ambiguous work

Loosely couple work requires either less frequent or less complicated interaction. Routine work, fewer dependencies Common Grounds on what needs to be done

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Coupling Characteristics

The greater the number of participants for a task, the more likely all aspect of the task are ambiguous. Common grounds between all the participants is very small

Task that are ambiguous is tightly couple until clarification is achieved.

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

Using shared technology assumes that the coworkers need to share information and are rewarded for it.

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

Some organizations’ habits and infrastructure are not ready for adoption of appropriate technologies for distance work.

How organization may not be ready Poor alignment of technology support

How to implement email communication when the majority of people have no PC.

existing patterns of everyday usage 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 Organization that have not adopt email, will not be ready adopter of

NetMeetings

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Technology Readiness Ordering

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. Although face-to-face interaction is a good comparison for future tools, it is not the

golden rule Distance tool may have properties that are better than face-to-face interaction.

Asynchronous nature of computationally-mediated interaction Sometime people do not have overlapping time to have extended discussions

Discussion Board

Anonymity People are sometime more truthful anonymous than face-to-face

Avatars, screen names

Revisability and Reviewability 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 People who are born and reside in entirely different countries will need

extra efforts to establish common grounds Local politics Sport events Holidays Social Interchange with locals

Technology can provide some contextual information, but it cannot possibly provide information about everything that affects team members 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.

Common grounds help develop trust which have been shown to improve efficiency and reliability in teams.

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Different Time Zone

The more time zone you cross, the less the time when people are at work at the same time.

Short overlapping work time cause people to rush work during overlap and delay decision making during non-overlap Reducing productivity

During overlap, people at different site is at different part of the day. Sleepy morning workers in one site Alert late afternoon workers in another

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Culture Possibly the single biggest factor that global teams need to

address is cultural differences.

Teams where participants are from two or more countries have frequent misunderstandings resulting from cultural differences.

Examples of cultural differences 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

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

Global companies are beginning to be populate by culturally knowledgeable personnel

During intense interaction or heat of discussion it is very hard to remain culturally considerate People 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

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

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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