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

几十年来，许多组织都在考虑并在某些情况下试验远程工作的想法。新型冠状病毒（COVID-19）的传播使全世界不由自主地立即进行了大规模远程工作的“beta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全部员工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、音频和视频进行交流，并实时共享和编辑文档。然而，到目前为止，我们还没有需要（或意愿）实验性地——大规模地——评估数字协作平台支持所有远程员工的能力。这次大流行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给分散的团队带来挑战和机遇。因此，本研究试图回答有关员工在突然转向远程协作之前、期间和之后如何组织远程工作的基本问题。这包括探索COVID-19对组织的持久影响，即使在恢复“新常态”之后。这个项目从研究工人中获得见解。它利用了调查（包括有关其社交网络的问题）、人力资源数据以及过去一年（在大流行之前）从四个组织收集的协作服务器日志数据。将从这些组织收集新数据，以了解大流行期间和大流行后的远程工作，从而增强这些数据。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2019冠状病毒病危机之前、期间和之后，员工利用技术的特定方式如何解释所观察到的团队合作模式的变化。它将探讨工作与生活的融合和倦怠对远程工作者的不同影响。此外，为了评估员工在COVID-19中断之前、期间和之后在数字平台上及其周围进行协作的方式发生的变化，将收集数据，检查组织或其他地方、州或国家机构为应对COVID-19而在何时以及实施了哪些工作场所政策。这些措施包括决定部分撤离办公室，完全在家避难，解雇某些类别的雇员，其他雇员无薪休假，强制使用某些技术，以及分阶段重新进入办公室。因此，该研究项目将促进我们对数字协作技术为远程协作团队（包括最极端的场景）提供挑战和机遇的方式的基本理解。它还将为工作场所相关政策干预如何影响团队合作技术的使用提供证据基础。这项研究的结果将有助于提出政策建议，说明在未来这种规模的危机中，应该如何利用技术在关键的过渡点进行协作。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。

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.