Telework:
An example of Cold Distributed Collaborative Work?

Loose coupling is often a reflection of organizational autonomy, e.g. when collaborative work takes place in different communities or departments within an organization. Frequently such work will also take place at different physical locations and/or at different times. Examples of such work might be undertaking individual research for a group project or writing a report for the rest of the group.

Although most of the literature on virtual organizations and virtual teams (see the previous section) advocates a mixture of both 'hot' and 'cold' working, home based working or teleworking can offer an example of some of the problems that are associated with an excessive reliance on only one form of Distributed Collaborative Work. For example, home based working means that there are few opportunities for interaction and feedback which can lead to social isolation and poor performance - a problem that is often compounded by the difficulty of effectively managing such work.

For supplementary reading on Teleworking see Home Based Work and Telework: where home meets workplace from the undergraduate MIS course.

Reading

Key text

• Supporting the shared care of diabetic patients
  This paper reports on a study of clinicians who care for diabetic patients. The clinicians who care for a particular diabetic patient are engaged in loosely-coupled collaboration. That is, they work largely autonomously, at separate sites. Our assumption is that loosely-coupled collaborations can be supported with workspaces which act as persistent accumulations of data around which joint problem-solving can discussed. See A study of diabetic patient care by Tim Kindberg for addition details of this study.

Books

• Re-inventing the workplace: managing space, time and technology. J. Worthington and S. Taylor (Eds.) Oxford, 1997
• Miles, I. et al (1987). IT Futures in Households and Communities. in Information Technology: social issues. Edited by R. Finnegan, G. Salaman and Thopmson, K. London, Hodder and Stoughton. 225-245.

Articles

• Kurland, N. B., Bailey, D. E. (1999). The advantages and challenges of working here, there, anywhere, and anytime. Organizational Dynamics, Autumn, 1999
• Virtual Teams versus Face-to-Face Teams: An Exploratory Study of a Web-based Conference System, Decision Sciences Journal, Volume 28, Number 4, Fall 1997
• Fulk, J. and de Sanctis (1995). Electronic Communication and Changing Organizational Forms. Organizational Science 6(4) 25-30.

Links

• Interlocus: Workspace Configuration Mechanisms for Activity Awareness
  This paper describes the concept of activity awareness, which enables workspace awareness without employing shared workspaces, and our framework for supporting activity awareness. Activity awareness extends the concept of asynchronous workspace awareness to provide asynchronous progress notifications and collective perspectives on related activities. Our framework adopts the temporally threaded workspace model, which tracks an activity in each individual's workspace by storing a sequence of snapshots of their workspace, and uses workspace configuration mechanisms to provide awareness functions.

• Toward integrated support of synchronous and asynchronous communication in cooperative work: An empirical study of real group communication
  This paper analyses the role of the two communication modes in co-operative work: synchronous and asynchronous. While it is natural and indispensable that both modes are used together, most existing groupware handles only one or the other, which reduces the effectiveness of co-operation. Several discussion characteristics using both modes are identified and the need for and the requirements for an integrated support system are clarified.

• A Survey of Home-Based Workers in Japan: Emerging Health Issues (.pdf)
  The aim of this paper is to explore attitudes to health management and the incidence of illness for home-based teleworkers in Japan. The data indicates that health management issues do exist and that a proportion of respondents experienced health conditions detrimental to their work performance. Additionally, a cavalier attitude towards safe work practices indicated either low worker awareness of, or low priority for, minimizing health risks. These findings suggest that conventional criteria for sickness may be being replaced by more elastic concepts of health and sickness in the virtual workplace.

• Timewarp: Techniques for Autonomous Collaboration (.pdf)
  This paper presents a set of techniques for supporting autonomous collaboration - collaboration where participants work independently for periods, and then join together to integrate their efforts. This paper posits that autonomous collaboration can be well-supported by systems in which the notion of time is made both explicit and editable, so that the parallel but divergent states of a shared artifact are exposed in the interface. We have developed a system, called timewarp, that explores these ideas, and provides support for distribution, awareness, and conflict resolution in an application-independent fashion.

• The Virtual Office: Applied Knowledge Management in a Collaborative Environment (.pdf)
  A case study of virtual working - Flare Consultants Limited operates in the international oil industry using a virtual office and an open culture, operating within a defined framework. Virtual working (people working together apart) enables people to communicate and collaborate without the need to physically come together. As a consequence, it was decided that a physical office was both costly and un-necessary due to the nature of the work so all consultants work from their homes.

• A Self-Efficacy Theory Explanation for the Management of Remote Workers in Virtual Organizations
  The current study is a first step in investigating how virtual organizations can manage remote employees effectively. The research used self-efficacy theory to build a model that predicts relationships between antecedents to employees' remote work self-efficacy assessments and their behavioral and attitudinal consequences.

• Remote Homeplace Communication: What is it Like and How Might We Support It? (.pdf)
  We introduce the study of homeplace communication as being relevant to the design of new communication technology for the home market. After reviewing current approaches to the field, we go on to describe the nature of remote homeplace communication over the telephone. The findings are contrasted with aspects of workplace communication and used to identify 7 user requirements for support.