Distance Matters Gary Olson & Judith Olson

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Distance Matters Gary Olson Judith Olson

• Hy Loc

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Outline

• Collocated Work
• Remote Work
• Four Concepts base on Observation
• Future Technology and Issues

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The Death of Distance by Frances Cairncross

• Geography, borders, time zonesall 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 theyve 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 persons 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 dont 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 persons background
• Appearance and behavior during interaction

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Establishing Common Grounds

• Observe how Miss Dimple is trying to establish an
  perspective of what Chico knows.

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Establishing Common Grounds

• Establish and maintaining common grounds from
  whatever cues we have at the moment
• Few cues result in difficulty in creating a
  common ground and more misunderstanding
• Misinterpretations requires more work to repair
• 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 others 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 peoples 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 730 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