Location: Online event. Please register here to access the Zoom links on the WebSci’21 website.
Contact: Y. Jasmine Wu, jasminewu@u.northwestern.edu
Date and Time: 10:00 am – 2:00 pm Central Daylight Time on June 22nd Tuesday
Session 1 10.00-11.10 Opening Keynotes (with introductions)
- 10.00 – 10.10: Welcome and Introductions by Jasmine Wu and Noshir Contractor
- 10.10 – 10.40: Ethan Bernstein (Harvard Business School) Implications of Working Without an Office (and Teaching Without a Classroom)
- Abstract: In early 2020, the world began what is undoubtedly the largest work-from-home experiment in history. Now, as countries reopen but Covid-19 remains a major threat, organizations are wrestling with whether and how to have workers return to their offices. Leaders need to be able to answer a number of questions to make these decisions. Primary among them is “What impact has working from home had on productivity and creativity?” To help answer that question, this study aims to explore how employees have fared since they began working virtually. To that end, Professor Bernstein and his co-authors surveyed a diverse group of more than 600 U.S.-based white-collar employees during the second half of March 2020 and have continued to do so every two weeks since then. In this keynote, Professor Bernstein will share some of their findings—and the implications for what comes next (in workplaces and in the classroom).
- 10.40 – 11.10: Paul Leonardi (University of California, Santa Barbara) Managing the Reverberations of Remote Work in the Post-COVID Era
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Abstract: The rapid shift to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic has brought many changes to the way people work. As people have struggled to work with team members who are not co-present and manage the effects of Zoom fatigue and communication overload, we’ve learned a great deal about the first-order effects of remote work. But these changes in the technologies people use and the way that work is allocated are also bringing second and third-order effects to the way teams work and organizations function. In this talk, Professor Paul Leonardi will explore these emerging reverberations of remote work for how we manage groups and teams, for how workers continue to learn and find job satisfaction, and for how we design our organizations. To do so, he will discuss how the changes in the way people use technologies are reshaping how attention is allocated in organizations and how subtle changes in the locus of information and data are changing who has the power within our organizations.
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Session 2 11.10-12.00
- 11.10 – 11.40: Balazs Vedres (University of Oxford) Remote Work and Collaborative Complexity During the Pandemic
- Abstract: Organizations rely on their informal network of collaboration and trust to function smoothly, to innovate, and to stay resilient in times of crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic forced most organizations to switch to remote work. This massive switch is an unprecedented natural experiment, where we can observe the impact of a sudden removal of face-to-face interactions. We analyze a dataset of dynamic organizational networks, where we compare trust, information, and collaboration ties before the switch to remote work, and during the spring of 2020, when the pandemic forced organizations to work from home. We found that change in connectivity varied widely across organizations, with remote work ties ranging between 40% and 250% of pre-pandemic connectivity. Complexity (measured by algorithmic complexity) had mostly decreased, either by increasing fragmentation, or increasing centralization. Gender inequalities increased, with women working more, but becoming less central than men.
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Break 11:40-11:50
- 11.50 – 12.00: Oshani Seneviratne (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), Jonathan Grey (DePaul University), & Isuru Godage (DePaul University) Smart Contracts Enabling Future of Work
- Abstract: As the knowledge workers of the post-Covid-19 world will be moving to a more online and remote medium of work, there are exciting new possibilities provided by relatively new and upcoming technologies. Blockchain technology is one such innovation that can be used to connect a diverse workforce across organizational boundaries. In our usual work settings, communication exchange occurs between people, between various systems, and between people and systems. These systems that we interact with comprise either standard software and AI agents that are increasingly capable of performing specific tasks that humans have been traditionally performing. Smart contracts one of the key components of blockchain technologies involve a set of people interacting with each other according to a self-enforcing open-source protocol and can help facilitate these growing communication needs and provides a great platform to enable trust between two or more mutually distrusting parties. As the workforce of tomorrow will consist of both human and AI agents with varying degrees of capabilities, smart contracts would provide a powerful medium in which humans can collaborate effectively. In fact, the future workforce will not be composed of employees, but rather it will be powered by contributors. Furthermore, in real-world applications such as search and rescue missions, humans will need to work with autonomous agents to achieve specific tasks. In this paper, we outline several ways in which smart contracts are beginning to transform the way we work, and describe an innovative specialized collaborative environment for secure communication of agents, both robotic and human, using smart contracts, called “Swarm Contracts.”
Session 3 12:00-13:00
- 12.00 – 12.25: Yufei Wu, Thilanka Munasinghe, Lydia Manikonda, & Oshani Seneviratne (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) Data-driven Analysis of COVID-19 Impact in China
- Abstract: This paper focuses on the teleworking caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, taking China as an example. Research shows that telecommuting has become popular since February 2020, and people have been slowly returning to the office from May in 2020 in China. Based on the two time-points, i.e., February 2020 and May 2020, this study calculated the growth to verify the negative impact of the manufacturing industry in teleworking, and prove that information-related industries are less affected by working from home. This paper also studies the impact of COVID-19 on the stock market and discussed what action the government should take in the further pandemic to provide a good economic environment. For the stock market, this study uses the Variance Inflation Factor (VIF) and Multivariate Analysis Of Variance (MANOVA) to screen the independent variables and adopted linear regression to judge the impact of the pandemic on the Chinese stock market as a whole and various sectors in the stock market. We further posit that personal psychological state is also an important factor affecting the efficiency of remote work. Therefore, misinformation is also a concern studied in this paper. In terms of rumors, Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) is calculated and the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model is used to find the keywords of different topics.
- 12.25 – 12.55: Nancy Baym, Rachel Bergmann, Sean Rintel, Advait Sarkar, Priscilla Wong, & Abigail Sellen (Microsoft Research) Tensions of Sociality in Enterprise Video Meetings During COVID-19
- Abstract: It has long been apparent that people who work remotely often miss interaction and feel more socially and professionally isolated than their on-site counterparts. When information workers across the world suddenly found themselves working from home in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, this lack of social connection became a pressing concern, one with enduring implications for a future with more remote work. People used to bumping into one another in hallways and chatting on their ways in and out of meetings found themselves turning to videoconference meetings to fulfill these needs, in addition to the collaboration and productivity needs they had always accomplished through temporally-limited and pre-arranged meetings. This talk reports on a large diary and poll study of one global technology company’s employees’ (N=849) experiences in all-remote video meetings from April through August 2020. Using iterative qualitative analysis, we identify key tensions that surfaced as people tried to balance their desire for personal connection with colleagues and their needs to be productive and conserve personal energy. We also consider the strategies individuals and teams developed to navigate those tensions.
- 12.55 – 13:00 Closing remarks by Jasmine Wu and Noshir Contractor