Metaverse Skills for Executives and Senior Managers: The Pros and Cons

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the shift from traditional office setups to remote working, driven by information and communication technology advancements. As a result, the metaverse concept is gaining popularity in modern organizations, allowing users to create avatars for virtual work, socializing, and other activities. While its corporate adoption is rising, managers must acquire the necessary skills to integrate and utilize the technology successfully. However, technological progress can be disruptive, making it essential to weigh the benefits and drawbacks.Methodology: This proposal aims to investigate metaverse skills that managers require for remote working using virtual realities, assessing the positive and negative risks for employees and management within business organizations. Using secondary data from reliable online databases, a qualitative research approach was used to understand the pros and cons of the metaverse and remote work.Purpose: The study examines the essential skills managers need to adopt metaverse virtual realities for remote working and how employees and organizations can implement it while maintaining a positive work environment. Keywords such as metaverse, remote working, virtual reality, and information and communication technology are critical. As technology evolves, managers and organizations must consider the metaverse's inherent advantages and disadvantages to ensure a successful transition to remote.Research Questions: What are the necessary skills needed by managers towards the adoption of metaverse virtual realities for remote working? How can employees and organizations adapt to implementing metaverse for remote work and sustain a positive work environment? © 2023 IEEE.

Reflecting on Hybrid Events: Learning from a Year of Hybrid Experiences

The COVID-19 pandemic led to a sudden shift to virtual work and events, with the last two years enabling an appropriated and rather simulated togetherness - the hybrid mode. As we return to in-person events, it is important to reflect on not only what we learned about technologies and social justice, but about the types of events we desire, and how to re-design them accordingly. This SIG aims to reflect on hybrid events and their execution: scaling them across sectors, communities, and industries;considering trade-offs when choosing technologies;studying best practices and defining measures of "success"for hybrid events;and finally, identifying and charting the wider social, ethical, and legal implications of hybrid formats. This SIG will consolidate these topics by inviting participants to collaboratively reflect on previous hybrid experiences and what can be learned from them. © 2023 Owner/Author.

Conjoint Analysis based Predictive Analytics to study the employee attitude towards virtual and digital work practices in IoT work environments

Covid-19 has been one of the most disruptive pandemics to date. Among the other aspects of disruption, it also disrupted the way people work in organizations. Many of the organizations surrendered their offices for good. However, there are many ill effects of these unconventional work practices also. This research study aims to explore the perception of the employees towards the adoption of Virtual and flexible work practices. The study uses a conjoint analysis approach on different possible Work Practice Profiles, that specify the nature of work (Virtual, offline, or hybrid), nature of work schedule (flexible, or fixed), nature of ownership (individual, or team), and length of working hours (8.5 hours, or 9.5 hours or 10.5 hours). The study finds that the number of working hours is the most important criterion for the employees followed by mode of work, responsibility, and work schedule. © 2023 IEEE.

The Effects of Virtuality on Agile Development

In this article, we explore how agile development teams are affected by transition from physical to virtual agile teamwork. To this end, we examined three agile teams at a software company, which due to Covid-19 had to change from working in a shared office space to individual home offices. We find that virtual work affects agile development in that there are fewer interactions, more written communication, more formalized relationships, and increased use of documentation. Furthermore, we find that virtual agile teams need a different style of team management. In light of this, we discuss whether a virtual context is compatible with agile development, or whether the form of work is affected so much that it no longer can be considered agile. © 2022 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.

Employee Perception of Enforced Telework in the Context of the Covid-19 Pandemic

Natural catastrophes, human-made disasters, or as most recently pandemics can force governments to impose telework for their citizen. With Twitter data from the Covid-19 time, where telework was required in Great Britain for certain periods, we look at employees' experience of telework. Our preliminary results indicate a more positive perception of telework while it was enforced due to Covid-19 restrictions, compared to a regular telework period. In our future research, we plan to deepen the understanding of the employees' topics of concern and to develop a model explaining how enforcement affects their perception of telework. © 2022 Owner/Author.

Remote Work and Satisfaction for Black Engineers and Computer Scientists

This Innovate Practice Full Paper discusses how many STEM professionals across all intersections have voiced the advantages of remote work. The preference of virtual work amongst professionals can vary for a lot of reasons such as being able to work and perform the role as a caretaker. COVID-19 has also proven that many professionals have been able to be perform just as well if not better while working from home. Professionals have been able to have more autonomy over their daily lives to organize their work and space. As most are aware, during this health crisis there has been a heightened exposure of racism and other intolerances across the country and globally. Social media has also been a tool to expand people's understanding of these injustices. For the Black community it has been a time to retreat, reclaim space, and take care of their selves, family, and communities through a variety of resistance tactics. Many have taken up to do the work to become (or becoming) allies. It is imperative to understand how remote work has been beneficial for Black professionals in engineering and computing fields as it relates to mitigating racism and any other forms of oppression. This could range from how virtual interviews worked to their advantage in landing positions to having their own space to work from without having to navigate micro and macro aggressions in-person. This paper will explore this phenomenon by gaining insight on the experiences of Black engineering and computing professionals in virtual settings through informal interviews and/or small focus groups. This study could potentially inform how remote work can be viewed as a tool for organizations to further support marginalized communities' needs for obtaining safe spaces in engineering and computing hegemonic cultures;as well as further inform research on how organizations can implement safe spaces for marginalized people in their policies through entities like remote work. © 2022 IEEE.

The Role of e-Leadership on the Productivity of Virtual Work in Higher Education

COVID-19 pandemic may further decline productivity of the workforce in the future especially in higher education. This article aims to verify the significance of e-leadership as organizational factor, digital collaboration as job factor, and digital mastery as personal factor on the productivity of virtual work in higher education. Online survey and causal analysis were conducted for supporting this article. It's about 847 academic and non-academic staffs who were participating as the respondents. PLS based Structural Equation Modelling were utilized for structuring and calculating the collected data. The result of statistical analysis reveals that e-leadership affects positively and significantly but indirectly on the productivity of virtual work. Digital mastery and digital collaboration play moderating role in determining effect of e-leadership on work productivity. For maintaining and leveraging the productivity of employee in doing virtual work, the organization should direct leadership of academic managers as transformational leadership approach for developing digital mastery and encouraging digital collaboration. © 2021 IEEE.

A FRAMEWORK FOR IMPLEMENTING THE LAST PLANNER® SYSTEM IN A VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT

The Last Planner® system (LPS) has witnessed a major shift in implementation at the onset of Coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19). Governed by maintaining social distancing and many other safety restrictions, some construction practices including LPS implementation are now taking place in the virtual environment. However, potential challenges and enablers of implementing LPS in such an environment are yet to be investigated. This paper presents a framework based on lean philosophy and aims at successful implementation of LPS in a virtual environment. The framework calls for embracing a strong lean culture in the virtual work environment. The study also seeks to outline the challenges and enablers of this implementation. The framework was tested on a construction project through an expert panel. Results show that the framework is promising, and that although COVID-19 inflicted many challenges, it also had some positive impacts on LPS implementation. The framework will help practitioners and managers adopt a systematic approach from initiation to implementation of LPS in a virtual environment. © Prof. Luis F. Alarcón and Assoc. Prof. Vicente González, IGL2021 All rights reserved.

Minimizing Communication Challenges Faced by Virtual Project Teams

During the 2020 spring semester, courses rapidly transitioned online in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This rapid transition online and transformation of team projects presented a unique opportunity to study team dynamics, specifically communication challenges, within virtual team projects. For most students, the 2020 spring semester was the first time they had to complete a virtual team project;however, with the rise in remote work in industry, many students will have jobs that include virtual work on teams. As such, investigating the communication challenges undergraduate engineering students experienced provides important insights to guide classroom instruction and tips for students working on virtual teams. Furthermore, this work has the potential to improve both virtual and in-person team project designs and increase the impact of team projects on the education of engineering undergraduate students by encouraging effective communication. We collected open-ended survey responses and conducted interviews with a range of engineering majors and class standing. We analyzed the data with a conventional qualitative content approach allowing for the development of emergent codes. Throughout the coding process, inter-rater reliability (IRR) quantitatively assessed the coding agreement across researchers until the IRR was higher than 80% for each coding category and the overall IRR across all categories was higher than 90%. The data from the interviews showed students perceived poorer team communication in the virtual environment, limiting team's effectiveness in completing tasks. Students mentioned that the environment had negative effects on the collaboration and relationship formation of the group members. Some students described strategies they adapted for improving communication, including approaches for establishing clear expectations, streamlining meetings, and building trust. Results indicate that designing a meeting structure with thorough planning documentation that designates time for social interactions to foster trust between team members is a powerful method for encouraging effective communication and overall project success. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021

Work in Progress: Examining the Literature on Virtual Internships for Insights Applicable to Engineers

Internships are undertaken by roughly half of U.S. engineering students nationally and are widely thought to benefit students in a variety of ways, strengthening students' academic self-concept and increasing their persistence in engineering [1]-[3]. However, the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 caused an unprecedented shift in the structure of internships, with approximately 83% of employers moving internships into a virtual work space [4]. While literature exists on in-person co-ops and internships [5]-[7], relatively little exists on engineering internships held virtually [8]. This Work-in-Progress paper reviews the literature on virtual internships across disciplines to find effective practices that can be applied to virtual engineering internships. The review sets the stage by a brief summary of research on traditional engineering internships and management of virtual teams before delving into findings on the opportunities and limitations as well as program design recommendations for virtual internships. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021