Previous research has shown that workplace social norms influence employee well-being. However, such norms vary based on the cultures in which workplaces are embedded, suggesting that cultural differences may influence perceived norms about when and where work should occur. These differences, in turn, could impact employee well-being. Accordingly, through the lenses of cultural tightness-looseness and individualism-collectivism, this paper investigates cultural differences in perceived social norms, and the relationship between those norms and hybrid workers’ well-being. We conducted a survey of 1,000 Japanese and 1,000 American hybrid workers. Results indicated that American respondents perceived stronger norms and demonstrated a higher willingness to conform to norms compared to Japanese respondents. Additionally, strong injunctive norms were positively associated with well-being among Americans but not among Japanese. Interviews (N = 24) showed that Japanese perceived injunctive norms negatively, while Americans saw them positively. We discuss implications for future remote-collaboration technologies in hybrid-work settings.

Previous studies have suggested that organizational social norms can positively affect employee well-being. However, such social norms have not been well developed during the post-COVID-19 transition to hybrid work, which combines office and remote work, and it is unclear how employees’ perceptions of social norms for hybrid work affect their well-being. In this study, we investigated the impact of social norms for hybrid work on the well-being of hybrid workers living in Japan through a mixed-method approach consisting of an online survey (n = 212) and semi-structured interviews (n = 20). The results indicate that hybrid workers who feel subject to strong social norms have lower well-being. Conversely, those who are more willing to conform to social norms have higher well-being. Given our findings, we discuss implications for the design of systems to help hybrid workers conform to organizational social norms and to improve their well-being.

With the widespread use of fitness trackers, predicting the future of individuals’ health is becoming easier. However, little is known about how presenting a prediction of an individual's future impacts one's behavior. In this study, we targeted walking behavior and aimed to clarify the impact of presenting a prediction of the number of steps on one's behavior. We conducted a five-week experiment with 36 participants using the application “StepUp Forecast”, which presents prediction on the basis of past lifelogs. We found that self-efficacy and the number of steps increased significantly when the predictions were presented compared with when only records of steps were shown. This was because people were motivated to exceed the predicted value. Furthermore, when additional steps were presented along with the step prediction, neither self-efficacy nor the number of steps increased. Our findings suggest that the prediction should be an achievable value in which the user can exceed, and that a positive feedback loop could be possible by enhancing self-efficacy through the experience of achievement.

We introduce a Japanese Kana-character entry method on touch screens for visually impaired people. Our proposal, "Move&Flick," allows the user to move a single finger in any of eight directions twice without lifting the finger on the screen to select a character; lifting the finger decides the character. The method uses radial areas with dead zones to detect each of the eight movement directions. An experiment shows that the dead zones and voice feedback let the user acquire proper finger directions in an easy learning process. The method also has an algorithm to correctly detect the change point from the first movement direction to the second movement direction. We evaluate Move&Flick in an experiment with visually impaired subjects and confirm that Move&Flick works well.

Users in peer-to-peer (P2P) content sharing can share their content by contributing their own resources to one another. However, since there is no incentive for contributing contents or resources to others, users may attempt to obtain content without any contribution. To motivate users to contribute their resources to the service, incentive-rewarding mechanisms have been proposed. On the other hand, emerging wireless technologies, such as IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks, beyond third generation (B3G) cellular networks and mobile WiMAX, provide high-speed Internet access for wireless users. Using these high-speed wireless access, wireless users can use P2P services and share their content with other wireless users and with fixed users. However, this diversification of access networks makes it difficult to appropriately assign rewards to each user according to their contributions. This is because the cost necessary for contribution is different in different access networks. In this paper, we propose a novel incentive-rewarding mechanism called EMOTIVER that can assign rewards to users appropriately. The proposed mechanism uses an external evaluator and interactive learning agents. We also investigate a way of appropriately controlling rewards based on the system service's quality and managing policy.