Digital tools promoting individual focus are increasingly popular in knowledge work. Yet their narrow framing of attention as a binary of focus versus non-focus can be unsustainable and discourage engagement in other vital activities, such as team coordination and collaboration. We introduce TimeMarbles, a web app that encourages more holistic self-reflection by tracking three modes of focus: high-focus, normal-focus, and break, as well as a team vs. individual dimension. In a two-week comparative structured observation in the field with 24 knowledge workers across six countries, we explored how users experience TimeMarbles vs. a more traditional focus-centric web app. Our thematic analysis shows that participants felt more positive about their day when tracking their time in TimeMarbles and that, despite the added logging effort, they preferred the more granular approach because it better represented the range of different attention and activities that characterize their workday. Our work points toward re-imagining digital workplace time-tracking tools to better support worker wellbeing.

Since the COVID-19 Pandemic, the knowledge workplace has seen a dramatic transition from collocated-first to hybrid or fully-remote arrangements, the implications of which are yet to be fully understood. One of the biggest unknowns is how remote team communication impacts the individual worker, especially in consideration of personality type. The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of remote workplace interactions on productivity and wellbeing, and how these effects are moderated by extraversion. The study lasted for 2-3 months and involved 60 knowledge workers. The data was analyzed using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. We present novel findings on how remote communication affects individuals differently depending on the type of interaction, interaction agent, and personality of the individual, showing that the impact of communication on workers is far from straightforward. We contextualize these findings with an in-depth analysis of communication patterns and experiences in the remote workplace, adding to existing literature. Finally, we present suggestions for a more individualized communication approach in industry and future research.

Many employees prefer to work from home, yet struggle to squeeze their office into an already fully-utilized space. Virtual Reality (VR) seemingly offered a solution with its ability to transform even modest physical spaces into spacious, productive virtual offices, but hardware challenges—such as low resolution—have prevented this from becoming a reality. Now that hardware issues are being overcome, we are able to investigate the suitability of VR for daily work. To do so, we (1) studied the physical space that users typically dedicate to home offices and (2) conducted an exploratory study of users working in VR for one week. For (1) we used digital ethnography to study 430 self-published images of software developer workstations in the home, confirming that developers faced myriad space challenges. We used speculative design to re-envision these as VR workstations, eliminating many challenges. For (2) we asked 10 developers to work in their own home using VR for about two hours each day for four workdays, and then interviewed them. We found that working in VR improved focus and made mundane tasks more enjoyable. While some subjects reported issues—annoyances with the fit, weight, and umbilical cord of the headset—the vast majority of these issues seem to be addressable. Together, these studies show VR technology has the potential to address many key problems with home workstations, and, with continued improvements, may become an integral part of creating an effective workstation in the home.

Software development is a collaborative process requiring a careful balance of focused individual effort and team coordination. Though questions of individual productivity have been widely examined in past literature, less is known about the interplay between developers' perceptions of their own productivity as opposed to their team's. In this paper, we present an analysis of 624 daily surveys and 2899 self-reports from 25 individuals across five software teams in North America and Europe, collected over the course of three months. We found that developers tend to operate in fluid team constructs, which impacts team awareness and complicates gauging team productivity. We also found that perceived individual productivity most strongly predicted perceived team productivity, even more than the amount of team interactions, unplanned work, and time spent in meetings. Future research should explore how fluid team structures impact individual and organizational productivity.

Open offices are cost-effective and continue to be popular. However, research shows that these environments, brimming with distractions and sensory overload, frequently hamper productivity. Our research investigates the use of virtual reality (VR) to mitigate distractions in an open office setting and improve one's ability to be in flow. In a lab study, 35 participants performed visual programming tasks in four combinations of physical (open or closed office) and virtual environments (beach or virtual office). While participants both preferred and were in flow more in a closed office without VR, in an open office, the VR environments outperformed the no VR condition in all measures of flow, performance, and preference. Especially considering the recent rapid advancements in VR, our findings illustrate the potential VR has to improve flow and satisfaction in open offices.