The Importance of Informal Conversation when Working from Home
Many people are now working from home due to social or physical distancing measures. This means that they go about their own work and occasionally (or frequently!) connect with others during meetings over video chat systems like Skype, Zoom, Blue Jeans, etc. This is beneficial, yet just meeting with others during planned meetings means missing out on the casual interactions or informal conversations that are at the heart of strong workplace cultures.
Early in my research career, I studied telecommuting and technology design for people who worked from home and used video conferencing to stay in touch with their colleagues. This work was done with the amazing Saul Greenberg, my graduate supervisor at the time. Together we designed and built next-generation video conferencing systems for telecommuters and we also studied what it is like to work from home.
The reality is that working from home can get pretty lonely. This is often because we miss out on seeing others and talking with them, in particular, in an informal way. We know from many research studies that a core part of workplace culture, collaborations, and the relationships that co-workers have with one another are casual interactions. These are the frequent exchanges one might have with their co-workers that are unplanned and often spontaneous. For example, you might bump into a colleague at the coffee machine and chat about your weekend. You might pass by someone in the hallway and say, hi, and ask how a project is coming along. Or, you may walk by someone’s office and see them working on a new design project and stop to ask them about it. Casual interactions can be about work stuff, or they can be about personal stuff. It doesn’t really matter. The point is, when people are working in the same place they happen. They are an important part of building relationships with one’s colleagues and can help foster joint, collaborative work.
Casual interactions are held together by informal awareness. This is knowledge of who is around and what they are doing. For example, before you decide to talk to a colleague at the coffee machine, you notice they are there when walking down the hall and so you decide to go and get a cup of coffee too. Informal awareness also involves other things like knowing when someone is in their office or not and whether it is a good time to stop by. For example, before stopping to chat with someone, you may glance in their office, see if they are there, and question whether they look busy. If not, you might stop to talk.
As people shift to working from home, casual interactions and informal awareness are typically lost. We don’t know what our colleagues are up to unless we email them or see them in a planned meeting. We may not think to ask about their weekend or how their family is doing when we join a Zoom meeting because the meeting quickly moves to ‘business talk.’ It can take a lot more effort to have casual interactions because we don’t simply see people at the coffee machine, notice them in their office when we walk by, and we certainly don’t bump into them in the hall when we’re working from home.
In our design work, Saul and I studied and created systems for telecommuters that left a video link going between a telecommuter’s home office and an office of one or more of their colleagues. The systems were much like Skype but had advanced sensing and communication features. The open video link meant that colleagues could glance and see when others were around, have casual conversations periodically throughout the day, and just simply feel each other’s presence. Now, of course, such an open video link isn’t for everybody. As part of this work, we extensively studied the privacy challenges that telecommuters face when using video conferencing systems from home. These are likely quite familiar to many people who are now working from home due to social or physical distancing. For example, others besides the person telecommuting can easily be captured by a video conferencing camera yet not want to be. Telecommuters are concerned about a messy background or how they look on camera. And, people may forget about the camera and do something embarrassing, e.g., pick their nose. Yah, we all do it.
What we see coming out of this work are lessons around the importance of casual or informal conversations and the need to try and recreate these when working from home. Many people have now adopted systems such as Slack where casual conversations can come and go throughout a day, somewhat akin to bumping into someone in the hallway and chatting. Systems like Slack also have awareness features where you can see if someone is in ‘away’, ‘do not disturb’, or ‘online’ mode. These are somewhat crude indicators of a person’s availability, and not nearly as rich as seeing someone when you walk by their office at work, yet they are still valuable to simply know that someone else is around. You can check out some of these research prototypes from the early 2000s that show even more features to support casual interactions in workplaces: Notification Collage and Community Bar.
One can also think about creating meetings that are more informal in nature over systems like Skype or Zoom. Why not setup a 15 min ‘coffee break’ call where people can join in if they like over a quick coffee? Or people could join scheduled video meetings 5 or 10 minutes early so that they can engage in small talk and casual conversations with their colleagues to see how they are doing. One could similarly stay after the end of a meeting to catch-up with co-workers and create an opportunity for informal interactions.
There are lots of ways of reconnecting with colleagues when separated by distance and forced to use video conferencing tools to stay aware and connected. The important thing is to be creative and try to create opportunities for casual and informal interactions so they can still occur despite the distance separation. Workplace culture depends on it.
Several papers are here:
Neustaedter, C. & Greenberg, S. (2003) The Design of a Context-Aware Home Media Space for Balancing Privacy and Awareness In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2003). [PDF]
Neustaedter, C., Greenberg, S. & Boyle, M. (2006) Blur filtration fails to preserve privacy for home-based video conferencing. IN ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 13.1–36. [PDF]
Biography:
I am a professor at Simon Fraser University in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology. I have studied how people connect with each other, interact, stay aware, and do joint activities over distance for two decades now. As a society, we are currently facing an unparalleled need to be apart via social distancing, yet we still need to be together, virtually.
My research group and I, along with our collaborators, have studied how many different types of people and relationships connect across distance ranging from workplace colleagues to long distance partners to grandparents and grandkids to friends and other family. This work is found in a whole host of our publications, however, the knowledge is mostly written for other academics, scientists, social scientists, designers, and industrial researchers. Yet I think much of the knowledge is relevant right now for everyday people as the world looks to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic.
I’m going to distill a number of our papers into a way that is likely much more useful to the general public, focusing on the challenges that remote communication creates for people and how they can overcome the issues to stay connected over distance. You’ll find these as blog posts over the coming days and weeks. My goal is to help people, to help people stay connected to those they work with and those they care about. I’m not looking for more citations, accolades, or credit — the goal is to help others with knowledge.
