HCC: Medium: Improving collaboration in remote teams through tools to promote mutual understanding of nonverbal behavior

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Virtual teamwork is becoming increasingly common, especially with the increase in remote work. Distributed, virtual teams are often challenged by mismatches in social conventions, work styles, and conversational norms, which can lead to misunderstandings that negatively affect relationships among team members and the quality of group work. Many tools have been developed for remote teamwork, involving traditional email and text chat; video conferencing; and virtual, augmented, and mixed reality. These generally try to recreate the way people behave in face-to-face meetings. Rather than recreate face-to-face interactions, this project works to create environments that improve people’s abilities to collaborate remotely, taking into account how non-verbal communication works and unique qualities of the individuals that make up a team. The goal is to improve interactions both remotely and when teams may later meet in-person. This research will make it easier for people to participate remotely in virtual teams and reduce the need for travel. It will also provide tools to train youth in STEM, through workshops at the annual Expanding Your Horizons program for 7th-9th grade girls and the Cornell Research in Engineering Academy program for high school girls.This research draws on unique affordances of VR to create novel interventions that draw on nonverbal communication to help team members understand how best to produce and interpret each other’s behaviors within a particular teamwork context. Specifically, this project will (a) develop a basic understanding about how individual differences influence people's own nonverbal behaviors and interpretations thereof in face-to-face and VR settings; (b) employ an iterative design approach to develop novel VR techniques that modulate people's verbal and nonverbal behavior in VR, to help team members mutually accommodate each other's behaviors; (c) investigate how users prefer to use such tools to manage their own self-presentation, and how they prefer to receive feedback from their teammates; and (d) evaluate the effectiveness of these techniques through controlled laboratory studies, field studies of student project teams, and a naturalistic field study with an industry partner. This research develops design guidelines on how to represent behavior in order to improve collaboration, and techniques to transform behavior while preserving individual autonomy.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.