Distance Matters to Weak Ties: Exploring How Workers Perceive Their Strongly- and Weakly-Connected Collaborators in Remote Workplaces
Chi-Lan Yang1, Naomi Yamashita2, Hideaki Kuzuoka1, Hao-Chuan Wang3, Eureka Foong4
1 Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, The University of Tokyo, Japan
2 NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Japan
3 Department of Computer Science, University of California, Davis, United States
4 Tokyo College, The University of Tokyo, Japan
The study complements the findings with mixed-methods: a survey, five-day experience sampling, and online semi-structured interviews.
Workers’ perceived engagement and willingness to collaborate with their selected strong and weak ties.
ABSTRACT
Workers tend to make inferences about one another's commitment and dedication to work depending on what cues are available to them, affecting worker relationships and collaboration outcomes. In this work, we investigate how remote work affects workers' perceptions of their colleagues with different levels of social connectivity, commonly referred to as strong ties and weak ties. When working remotely, workers' perceptions of weak ties may suffer due to the lack of in-person interaction. On the other hand, workers' inferences about their strong ties may also be impacted by losing richer communication cues, even though they had more connections with their strong ties than weak ties. This study explores how remote workers make inferences about engagement levels of and willingness to collaborate with weak ties compared to strong ties. We used a mixed-methods approach involving survey data, experience sampling, and in-depth interviews with 20 workers from different companies in Taiwan. Results showed that workers depended on one-on-one synchronous tools to infer the engagement level of strong ties but used group-based communication tools to infer the engagement level of weak ties. Interestingly, the absence of cues in remote workplaces exacerbated prior impressions formed in the physical office. Furthermore, remote work led workers to develop polarized perceptions of their respective ties. We discuss how characteristics of computer-mediated communication tools and interaction types interplay to affect workers' perceptions of remote colleagues and identify design opportunities for helping remote workers maintain awareness of weak ties.
Possible presentations of available (A) and unavailable (B) social cues for weak ties in remote workplaces.
BIBTEX
@article{Yang2022DistanceMT,
title={Distance Matters to Weak Ties},
author={Chi-Lan Yang and Naomi Yamashita and Hideaki Kuzuoka and Hao-Chuan Wang and Eureka Foong},
journal={Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction},
year={2022},
volume={6},
pages={1 - 26}
}