RAPID: Teaming in the Time of Covid-19: Understanding how technology affordances can enable collaboration during sudden workplace disruption

组织已经考虑并在某些情况下尝试了几十年的远程工作的想法。新型冠状病毒（COVID-19）的传播让全世界都参与了一场大规模远程工作的非自愿和即时“测试”。在几周的时间里，美国和其他地方的政府机构已经下达了就地避难的命令，要求组织立即将几乎所有的劳动力转移到远程工作安排。毫无疑问，这些向远程工作安排的快速和大规模转变正在利用数字协作平台开发的最新进展，这些平台使团队能够通过文本，音频和视频进行通信，并实时共享和编辑文档。然而，到目前为止，我们还没有必要（或意愿）进行实验性的大规模评估数字协作平台支持远程工作人员的能力。疫情为我们提供了一个前所未有的机会，让我们了解突然转向远程协作如何为分布式团队带来挑战和机遇。因此，这项研究旨在回答有关工人如何组织远程工作之前，期间和之后突然转向远程协作的基本问题。这包括探索COVID-19对组织的持久影响，即使在恢复到“新常态”之后。“这个项目从研究工人中汲取了见解。它利用了调查（包括有关其社交网络的问题）、人力资源数据以及在过去一年（大流行之前）从四个组织收集的协作服务器日志数据。这些数据将通过从这些组织收集新数据来扩充，以了解大流行期间和之后的远程工作。这些包括调查、人力资源数据、协作服务器日志以及定性访谈。综合这些纵向数据，将有助于我们理解，在COVID-19危机之前、期间和之后，工人利用技术的特定方式如何解释观察到的团队合作模式的转变。它将探讨工作与生活的融合和倦怠如何对远程工作者产生不同的影响。此外，为了评估员工在COVID-19中断之前、期间和之后如何在数字平台上和周围协作的变化，将收集数据，以检查组织或其他地方、州或国家机构为应对COVID-19而制定的工作场所政策的时间和内容。其中包括部分撤离办公室、完全在家避难、解雇某些类别的雇员、其他人停薪留职、强制使用某些技术以及分阶段重返办公室等决定。因此，该研究项目将推进我们对数字协作技术为远程协作团队（包括最极端的情况）提供挑战和机遇的方式的基本理解。它还将提供一个证据基础，说明与工作场所有关的政策干预措施如何影响技术的使用，以促进团队合作。这项研究的结果将有助于产生政策建议，关于如何利用技术，使合作在关键的过渡点，在未来的危机，这种规模。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得的支持，通过评估使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准。

Organizations have contemplated and - in some cases - experimented with the idea of remote work for several decades. The spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has enlisted the world in an involuntary and instantaneous "beta-test" of remote work at scale. In the span of a few weeks, shelter-in-place orders have come down from government agencies in the US and elsewhere requiring organizations to transition nearly their entire workforces to remote work arrangements instantaneously. Undoubtedly, these rapid and wholesale shifts to remote work arrangements are leveraging recent advances in the development of digital collaboration platforms that enable teams to communicate via text, audio, and video and to share and edit documents in real-time. However, until now, we have not had the need (or the will) to experimentally - and at scale - assess the ability of digital collaboration platforms to support an all remote workforce. The pandemic offers us an unprecedented opportunity to understand how the sudden switch to remote collaboration presents challenges and opportunities to distributed teams. Thus, this research seeks to answer fundamental questions about how workers organize for remote work before, during, and after a sudden shift to remote collaboration. This includes exploring the lasting impacts of COVID-19 on organizations, even after returning to the "new normal." This project draws insights from studying workers. It leverages surveys (including questions about their social networks), HR data, as well as data from collaboration server logs that have been collected over the past year, prior to the pandemic, from four organizations. These data will be augmented by collecting new data from these same organizations to understand remote work during and post pandemic. These include surveys, HR data, collaboration server logs, as well as qualitative interviews. Taken together these longitudinal data will help us understand how the observed shifts in patterns of teamwork can be explained by the particular ways in which workers utilize technology before, during and after the COVID-19 crisis. It will explore how work-life blending and burnout differentially impact remote workers. Furthermore, to assess changes in how employees collaborate on and around digital platforms before, during, and after COVID-19 disruption, data will be collected that examine when and what workplace policies were put in place by organizations or other local, state or national agencies in response to COVID-19. These include decisions for partial evacuation of offices, total shelter-at-home, lay-offs for certain categories of employees, leave without pay for others, mandatory use of certain technologies, as well as phased re-entry back into the office. As such, the research project will advance our fundamental understanding of the manner in which digital collaboration technologies provide challenges and opportunities to teams collaborating - including the most extreme scenario - remotely. It will also provide an evidentiary base for how workplace related policy interventions impact the use of technology for teamwork. Results from this research will contribute to generating policy recommendations about how technologies should be used to enable collaboration at key transition points during a future crisis of this magnitude.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.