FW-HTF-P: Rapid Organizational Assimilation in On-demand Work through Social Learning

互联网和相关技术改变了人们的工作方式，允许人们远程工作，而且越来越多的人从事短期项目或零工。在线平台使得工人更容易找到短期工作，雇主也更容易雇佣自由职业者来满足他们的短期需求。这种短期工作安排为员工提供了他们渴望的独立性和灵活性，同时让公司可以暂时利用员工所缺乏的外部知识和经验。然而，今天的短期工人存在于他们临时工作场所的边缘，他们发现在雇佣他们的组织中建立社会关系是一项挑战，这对他们的幸福感和生产力都产生了负面影响。来自少数民族或边缘群体的工人受到的负面影响尤其严重。该项目将制定一项研究计划，通过与两家行业合作伙伴建立独特的伙伴关系，加速融入未来的工作环境。这两家行业合作伙伴的经营规模和对自由职业者的依赖程度各不相同：一个合作伙伴是一家固定雇员少于100人的小型企业，另一个合作伙伴是一家在许多国家开展业务的大型跨国信息技术和研究公司。在与这些合作伙伴的协调下，研究人员将组织一系列讲习班，以制定一个广泛造福于工人和组织的重点研究议程。基于这个议程，项目团队将包括不同的利益相关者，如行业代表、工人和研究人员，他们可以在这个研究议程上取得进展。这项计划中的研究还将培养跨多个学科的研究生，包括计算机科学、社会科学和组织科学。鉴于该项目的中心重点是包容性和可及性，该项目将特别强调招募女性、有色人种学生和第一代学生为这项研究做出贡献。这个项目汇集了几个学科，包括学习科学、计算机科学和社会心理学。该建议的智力贡献是建立工作环境的需求和关键技术支持，以便通过社会学习快速同化。这是通过专注于为远程零工工作者设计社交工具来实现的。这项研究是高度整合的，汇集了社会/行为科学和计算机/学习科学的专业知识。团队的结构是为了实现多个融合目标：为了解决按需员工快速融入组织的需求，本研究将揭示数字和物理环境的社会和技术需求，以加速新人的学习和同化。其次，它将建立一个多元化和跨学科的团队，在计划的未来研究中建立这样的环境。最后，该项目将对高技能、经济意义重大的信息工作者队伍产生积极影响，该项目的研究议程可能特别有助于女性和代表性不足的工人更多地加入劳动力队伍。该议程将概述关键研究问题、定量和定性研究方法以及设计环境（数字和物理）的评估指标，这些环境可以加强同化和社会化方面的工作实践，重点是获取、包容和公平。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The Internet and related technologies have transformed the way of work, by allowing people to work remotely, and increasingly, on short-term projects or gigs. Online platforms make it easier for workers to find short-term work and for employers to hire freelancers for their short-term needs. Such short-term work arrangements offer workers the independence and flexibility they desire, while at the same time allowing companies to momentarily tap into external knowledge and experiences their workforce lacks. However, short-term workers today exist on the fringes of their temporary workplaces and find it challenging to build social connections within the organizations that hire them, affecting both their well-being and productivity negatively. Workers from minority or marginalized groups are particularly impacted negatively. This project will develop a research program that accelerates assimilation into future work settings through a unique partnership with two industry collaborators, who operate at very different scales and rely on freelancers to varying degrees: one partner is a small business with fewer than a hundred permanent employees, the other partner is a large, multinational information-technology and research company that operates in many countries. In coordination with these partners, the researchers will organize a series of workshops to create a focused research agenda that is beneficial for workers and organizations broadly. Based on this agenda, the project team will include diverse stakeholders, such as industry representatives, workers, and researchers, who can then make progress on this research agenda. This planned research will also train graduate students across multiple disciplines, including computer science, social sciences, and organizational science. Given the central emphasis on inclusion and access, the project will place particular emphasis on recruiting women, students of color, and first-generation students to contribute to this research. This project brings together several disciplines, including learning science, computer science, and social psychology. The intellectual contribution of this proposal is to establish the requirements and key technological affordances of a work environment for rapid assimilation through social learning. This is done by focusing on the design of socialization tools for remote gig workers. The research is highly integrative and converges expertise from social/behavioral sciences and computer/learning science. The team is structured to achieve multiple convergent goals: To address the need for rapid assimilation of on-demand workers into organizations, this research will uncover the social and technical needs for digital and physical environments that accelerate newcomer situated learning and assimilation. Second, it will build a diverse and cross-disciplinary team to build such environments in planned future research. Finally, this project will positively impact a highly skilled, and economically significant workforce of information workers at large, and the project's research agenda is likely to particularly help female and underrepresented workers be more included in the workforce. This agenda will outline key research questions, quantitative and qualitative study methodologies, and evaluation metrics for designing environments (both digital and physical) that enhance work practices in assimilation and socialization, with an emphasis on access, inclusion, and equity.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.