How will you see my greatness if you can't see me?

ACM Queue, 2003

Culture T echnology has made it possible for organizations to construct teams of people who are not in the same location, adopting what one company calls "virtual collocation." 1 Worldwide groups of software developers, inancial analysts, automobile designers, consultants, pricing analysts, and researchers are examples of teams that work together from disparate locations, using a variety of collaboration technologies that allow communication across space and time.

Anais do VI Workshop sobre Aspectos Sociais, Humanos e Econômicos de Software (WASHES 2021), 2021

New hires usually should learn about the working process, organization structure, and company corporate culture and to be acquaintance with a very new environment. It requires company to organize throughout a well-planned onboarding process, but many companies are not aware of onboarding models and how to support onboard process to become more efficient. We aimed to characterize the main methods through an ad-hoc literature review. We provide practitioners and researchers with the rationale to identify onboarding models and characteristic of the main methods relate to onboarding Software Engineering.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2008

As companies become more and more distributed, multi-site development is becoming a norm. However along with the new opportunities, geographic distribution is proven to increase the complexity of software engineering introducing challenges for remote team communication, coordination and control. In this article we present an illustrative singe-case study with an intra-organizational intra-national context focussing on the effect of geographic distribution on team coordination practices and how this influences remote team performance. Based on our findings we conclude that a) distribution significantly influences the nature of coordination; b) remote team coordination mechanisms can't be chosen disregarding the complexity of the given tasks and c) the distribution of work on complex software development tasks shall be avoided.

India HCI 2021, 2021

The Covid-19 pandemic caused major work disruptions and made remote working the only prevailing work arrangement for knowledge workers and organizations across the globe. The primary objective of this study is to identify the key drivers that impact the self-reported productivity and job motivation of remote working employees. The secondary objective is to identify the underlying factors that remote working employees perceive as important to increase the success of remote work. We adopt a mixed-methods approach through quantitative and qualitative research methods. Through the analysis of a self-administered questionnaire from 142 participants, we identified factors that impact the productivity and job motivation of remote workers and used these insights to create a conceptual framework. We then conducted Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) to discover the factor structure of the large set of variables in our study. Based on our findings, an interactive application with three features was proposed. To validate the features and to gather feedback about the usability, we conducted focus group interviews using storyboards in phase two of the study. This paper helps in understanding the five factors that remote working employees perceive important to increase the success of remote working teams. Researchers predict that the post-pandemic work will be a hybrid mix of traditional in-office and remote work where the latter will be more prevalent. Consequently, the findings and factors determined in this research contribute to the knowledge of remote work and can benefit the HCI community for designing usable, meaningful products and services for remote and hybrid teams.

2012

Excerpt] Although remote work offers a number of potential benefits, it is not without risks and challenges. Companies can find it difficult to build a culture that is accepting and supportive of remote work. It can also be difficult to track exactly who is working remotely, particularly when remote work is adopted more informally, and to measure the business impact of these initiatives. Remote workers can face a number of personal and professional challenges. For instance, they may struggle for exposure and access to professional opportunities and there is the risk that those working outside the office can become socially isolated. These issues suggest that companies need to be both careful and deliberate in how they design and implement their remote work programs. Although the academic community can help support evidence-based remote work practices, it is clear that this is an area in which practice is significantly outpacing research. This is not to say that research on remote work does not exist. In fact, there are some excellent studies in this area and we have gained significant insight into some issues, such as the impact of remote work on work-life integration. However, the academic literature has little to say on other topics, such as how to best manage development and advancement opportunities for remote workers.

Software Process Improvement …, 1998

Journal of Organizational and End User Computing, 2000

Information technology (IT) is enabling the creation of virtual organizations and remote work practices. As this practice of working remotely grows, so does the importance of making these remote end-users of technology effective members of organizations. This study tested a number of relationships that were suggested in the literature as being relevant in a remote work environment. Interpersonal trust of the employee in their manager was found to be strongly associated with higher self-perceptions of performance, higher job satisfaction and lower job stress. There was weak support for the impact of physical connectivity (i.e., the availability of IT) on job satisfaction, supporting the enabling role of IT. These findings were similar for both remote employees (i.e., those that worked in a different building than their managers) and non-remote employees. However, more frequent communications between the manager and employee was associated with higher levels of interpersonal trust only with the remote workers. Cognition-based trust was also found to be more important than affect-based trust in a remote work environment, suggesting that managers of remote employees should focus on activities that demonstrate competence, responsibility and professionalism.

2016

Agile software development relies heavily on tight and continuous collaboration, which becomes a challenge when team members work at a distance. Despite significant focus on distributed Agile working, remote working, when only one or two individuals are not co-located with the rest of the team, remains largely unexplored. We focus on one organisation with several such teams and investigate one in detail using distributed cognition – a theoretical framework for studying collaborative work. We present the results of a group retrospective, and a comparative analysis of collaboration in the team, taking the contrasting perspectives of the remote worker and his co-located teammates. The analysis shows substantial differences in three aspects: virtual artefacts; information flow; and the primacy of structure and facilities provided by collaborative platforms. Platforms that support meaningful collaboration and engagement for the remote worker, and create parity between all members of the ...