Shared Workspaces of the Digital Workplace: From Design for Coordination to Coordination for Flexible Design

Abstract

The emergence of new digital platforms and social software at work changes workplaces and how people coordinate their work. To date, coordination has only been minimally studied in the context of the social software enabled digital workplace. Through a qualitative analysis, we identify different coordination mechanisms (CM) in various practice areas as envisioned and used with the same collaboration platform by three healthcare workplace teams. The findings illustrate the flexibility of shared workspace designs of the digital workplace where CM cannot be anticipated a priori by researchers and software developers. We end with a discussion of the findings from a sociomaterial perspective to encourage studies that monitor the flexible and complex enactment of temporally emerging shared workspace designs.

Constraints and Enablement of Workplace Digitalisation: An Integrative Review

“…A digital workplace encompasses a variety of technologies and practices that improve employees' digital work experience, regardless of their physical location, surpassing traditional concepts of information and communication technologies (Marsh, Vallejos, and Spence,2022). As stated by Dery, Sebastian, and Van Der Meulen (2017), a digital workplace refers to an integrated digital environment where various tools are utilised, ranging from enterprise resource planning software to social intranets (Nitschke et al 2020), employee portals, and email systems (Zimmer, Baiyere, and Salmela, 2020), virtual meeting tools (Herrera et al 2012), dashboards, feeds, alerts, and calendars (Attaran et al 2019). According to Hamburg (2020), the digital workplace encompasses all the digital technologies and services utilised by individuals in their current work environment, including both existing and forthcoming ones.…”