productivity

Intelligences

Beyond Zoom Fatigue: Ritual and Resilience in Remote Meetings

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John Sherry speaking on stage at EPIC2022. Projected slide says "How is remote work affecting resilience?"
SUZANNE L. THOMAS1 Intel Corporation JOHN W. SHERRY Intel Corporation REBECCA CHIERICHETTI Intel Corporation SINEM ASLAN Intel Corporation LUMINIŢA-ANDA MANDACHE University of Salzburg, Austria COVID-19 has precipitated a massive social experiment – the sudden shift of millions of knowledge workers from their traditional offices to homes or other remote work locations. This has inspired heated debates and new ways of imagining the future of work. This paper hopes to contribute to a better understanding of these changes by reporting on the results of several dozen in-depth interviews with remote workers from a variety of geographies, industries and professions. We focus in particular on their experiences of remote meetings, with special attention to complaints workers have with their current implementation. As we learned, workers’ complaints tended to be driven by social – rather than productivity or technical – concerns. We explore this social dimension in depth, propose a framework for thinking about meetings...

Perspectives

Making Productivity Social Again: Melissa Gregg’s Counterproductive—Time Management in the Knowledge Economy

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a book review by RAYMOND JUNE, Workday Most of us struggle with managing our time while feeling perpetually swamped with work. White-collar professionals, myself included, have often turned like supplicants to time management tools ranging from self-help books to productivity software to maximize efficiency in less time. Confession: I once purchased a paper pocket guide to improving time management when feeling anxious about workplace performance pressures before the start of a new job. Despite its familiar and well-worn exhortations – set goals, track your time, create to-do lists, manage emails, develop routines, delegate – I clung to the belief that this manual among the surfeit of how-to texts and apps out there would be the one to help boost my productivity. My preemptive attempt at mastering time to reach peak personal performance raises a key question about today’s productivity-obsessed work culture: What, really, is the larger goal of work when the search for time-saving measures in the pursuit of productivity is its given...

Intelligences

The Root Cause is Capitalism… and Patriarchy

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LINDSEY WALLACE, PHD Adobe Design Research & Strategy Team JENNA MELNYK Adobe Design Research & Strategy Team Case Study—The authors used anthropology and other design research methods to develop a new kind of study to capture the world of professional creatives and the people they work with. To uncover core collaboration challenges for professional creatives the authors asked asked them to walk through past projects, who they interacted with at different points, and discuss their affective experiences. Critical collaborative problems for participants in this study stemmed from two factors: ever-increasing corporate demands to do more with less, and concurrent attempts to automate feminized administrative coordination tasks. To communicate actionable findings, the authors balanced systems-level thinking with the identification of the kinds of problems Adobe could and would solve. While large scale social change was outside the scope of actionable recommendations for a product design team, the implications of social structures...

Intelligences

Changing the Perspective of Government

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EMMA SAUNDERS Empathy MAILYNN STORMON-TRINH Empathy STEPHANI BUCKLAND Previously Empathy Case Study—This case study highlights the value of ethnography in changing a client's perspective. New Zealand's productivity has been deceasing, and the government wants to reverse that trend. Empathy's government client believed that macro-level forces were having a major impact on the productivity of small businesses, and wanted to suggest ways for small businesses to directly combat those forces. Empathy conducted ethnographic research, and the results required the client to change their perspective. While the government client saw increased productivity as a means to increase the standard of living, ethnographic research revealed some small businesses see increased productivity as a threat to their values and standard of living. If the government wanted to increase productivity, they were going to have to change tact completely and start talking to and supporting small businesses in a way that took their fears, motivations, beliefs...

Intelligences

Disrupting Workspace: Designing an Office that Inspires Collaboration and Innovation

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RYOKO IMAI Hitachi America MASAHIDE BAN Hitachi America Case Study—Hitachi America's R&D, comprised of five technical laboratories, opened the Center for Social Innovation in January, 2016. When the new office project emerged, the R&D group used the opportunity to reflect on and strengthen collaborative practices, organizational culture, and our customer engagement approach. We conducted an internal ethnographic study to investigate how space was used in our previous office, and based on our findings designed a new office space to facilitate collaboration and innovation for our group....

Intelligences

Bodywork and Productivity in Workplace Ethnography

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screen shot from Sam Ladner's presentation "Bodywork"
SAM LADNERMicrosoft Corporation Office workers still rely on their bodies to communicate with each other, despite many decades of technology use. This Pecha Kucha explores how and in what ways office work involves people’s bodies and this “bodywork” plays in productivity. I argue that technology is now able to emulate some effects of bodywork. Sam Ladner is a sociologist who researches the intersection of work, technology, and organizations. She is a senior researcher at Microsoft in the Applications and Services Group, where she studies emerging productivity practices. She is also the author of Practical Ethnography: A Guide To Doing Ethnography in The Private Sector. sladner@microsoft.com | @sladner on Twitter 2014 Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings, ISSN 1559-8918. © American Anthropological Association and Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference, some rights reserved. References Geertz, C. (2000). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Nardi, B., & Whittaker, S....