Collaborating in a Crisis: Perspectives on Trust and Technological Framework in Organising a COVID-19 Online Hackathon

This paper explores trust in online-only-collaboration, where a team was gathered to organise a COVID-19 online hackathon with only three days notice. The study is based on the thematic analysis of ten in-depth interviews with the hackathon organisers. The findings report how trust among the organisers was encapsulated in 1) the shared big goal, 2) the significance of real-life networks, 3) a strong lead organiser on the collaboration forming on the fly, and 4) the lack of face-to-face contact in relation to becoming familiar or staying unknown. Technology related findings showed that the collaboration platforms were selected based on familiarity and ease of use. The chosen communication channels created a split between age groups, and transparency of the communication suffered somewhat from one-to-one communications in the background and divided application use. However, trust between the organisers helped them to overcame the transparency challenges. The findings are applicable to societal crisis situations in which technologies are used to build collaboration in aim to address shared challenges. © 2022 ACM.

Understanding work experience in epidemic-induced telecommuting: The roles of misfit, reactance, and collaborative technologies.

In the management of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the mandated closure of workplaces and stay-at-home orders have forced workers to adapt to a prolonged period of unplanned telecommuting, which we term epidemic-induced telecommuting. Although epidemic-induced telecommuting has drastically altered how work is conducted, scant attention is being paid to this emerging work arrangement. To this end, we combine psychological reactance theory and person-environment fit theory to advance the concept of misfit between worker and environment as a core determinant of employees' work experience in the epidemic-induced telecommuting. Particularly, we distinguish between supply-value and demand-ability misfits as constraints on workers' freedom at work. Having analyzed data collected through a survey administered on remote workers, we discovered that both misfits positively influenced workers' perceived psychological reactance, which led to work exhaustion and counter-productive behaviors. We also found that the utilization of collaborative technologies moderated the effects of misfit on workers' psychological reactance.

Teleworker's Perception of Technology Use for Collaborative and Social During the COVID-19 Pandemic

With the flourish of collaborative and social technologies in the market since the pandemic, there is limited understanding of user's attitudes towards these technologies. We aim to understand teleworkers' perceptions of technology use during the pandemic and interviewed 46 teleworkers. We found that teleworkers generally hold a positive attitude towards social technologies and are creative to use these technologies to meet their social needs;they express overall negative feelings about remote collaboration technologies, though online communication flattens the communication hierarchy in the organization. The pandemic amplifies the extant challenges and highlights the shortcomings of technological design in well-established teleworking research and remote collaboration work. We suggest that future design should 1) combine and commercialize solutions that are well-grounded in prior work;2) consider scenarios that are typically missed and can be easily replaced with collocated interaction from the pre-pandemic context into the forced teleworking context. © Cai et al. Published by BCS Learning and Development Ltd.