Pacific Bell conducted a trial of The Coordinator, a tool for computer-supported cooperative work. The trial group had diverse job functions and was dispersed across a variety of geographical locations and computing environments. The trial attempted to both measure the effectiveness of The Coordinator as a communications tool and to evaluate the speech act communications paradigm on which it is based. Only the first of these two goals was realized. Changes in subjects' cognition were assessed using a series of semantic differential scales. One negative cognitive shift was supported by the data. However, the anecdotal evidence was far more negative, suggesting that the experimental methodology be enhanced to include measurement of affective dimensions of group dynamics. Implementation and support for cooperative work systems were found to be more difficult than anticipated. The test group was not convinced that The Coordinator offered functionality that was worth the effort involved in learning to use the product. An improved interface, more flexible terminology, and better implementation support is needed for successful installation of The Coordinator, or similar products.
This paper reports on a year‐long research project undertaken by the authors and a group of sponsoring corporations to explore the future of work and thereby the workplace. Experiences, ideas and data were shared to address questions about the changing nature of the workforce itself, new workplace designs, new technology capabilities and the economics of supporting and leveraging knowledge workers. But this paper does more than report on specific findings, it interprets, predicts and offers the authors’ personal perspectives in order to share with readers their own views of the issues and challenges facing facility managers today as they prepare their organisations for a changing and very different world of work in the near future.
Whereas the Industrial Revolution attracted workers away from home‐based community settings to central locations, the current proliferation of personal computers and asynchronous telecommunications technologies is reversing this trend. By networking employees from different geographical sites together, these technologies are producing “hybrid” organizational structures that permit their members to work within flexible schedules and in flexible places, even to the point of working at home. The result is the electronically distributed work community: a population of nonproximal coworkers who labor together electronically. This paper presents a springboard for conducting research on telework as it is understood within the context of that community. The paper begins with a brief history of telecommuting and describes its influence on the electronic community and organizational structures in general within the past two decades. The paper concludes by presenting implications for research on telework in the areas of privacy regulation, emergency preparedness, self‐efficacy, temporal aspects of employee behavior, communication patterns, and organizational effectiveness.
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