Articles

NewWOW commissioned a research paper, Intercultural Collaboration in Global Teams by Professors Pamela Hinds and Catherine Cramton. This paper was presented at the 5th NewWOW Symposium, held July 13-16 2008 in San Jose, CA.
The authors describe the challenges and opportunities in intercultural collaboration and the impact of culture on best practices for globally distributed work teams.

NewWOW’s fifth symposium was held July 13 through July 16, 2008 in San Jose, California. We explored the impact of culture on best practices for distributed work groups. Our keynoter was Professor Pamela Hinds of Stanford University, who also wrote a research paper on the subject for the Symposium. Her research helped us understand how culture could affect perception and acceptance of distributed work practices, and by implication, whether different work practices would be needed when distant teams included people from different cultures.

Our spring Tertulia, on April 24, 2008 featured Michael Joroff, Senior Lecturer, MIT School of Architecture and Planning, Mattias Bergman, Principal of the Infrastructure Solutions Group and Anthony Townsend, Institute For The Future.

Eric Richert, principal of 8 Corners Consulting and the former director of Sun Microsystem’s Open Work Practice, prepared a research paper that analyzes the work practices and success factors that managers and employees use to work at a distance. It aims to provide answers to the question: "What do we do 
to make distributed work situations work well?”

NewWOW welcomes several new members in the network: Nokia, CUH2A, Applied Materials, Cisco Systems, RTKL and Stanford University.

Our third in a series of New Ways of Working white papers focuses on how the workplace is being impacted by changing workstyles such as distributed and mobile work. If fewer and fewer workers come to the central office to work, how will these offices be used in the future? Is the centralized office as a place to work an artifact of the 20th century? If the office has a future, what direction will it take?

Our third symposium was held on July 29th through 31, 2007. The theme was Sustainability through New Ways of Working. The program was an "energetic" and stimulating one, with energy consultant, Hal Levin, presenting the results of his review of total system approaches to sustainability. Follow-up panels on organizational behavior, urban development, location planning, workplace strategies, and technologies also took place. In addition to Hal, participants included energy experts from VTT and Dr. Suvi Nenoen from Helsinki University of Technology, principal investigator of ProWork: Workplace Productivity, a new Tekes-sponsored project.

This is Joe Ouye’s presentation in May 2006 for EDRA 37. (32 slides)
He asks the question: Can dispersed team be as productive, quick and innovative as collocated teams? The answer: in some circumstances, yes. The presentation covered a lot of ground, including the advantages and major challenges for teams working across distance, the top ten best practices for distributed teams, and trends in virtual collaboration.

What do workplace studies say about workspace choice?
A NewWOW member posted a study he co-authored on workplace environment and performance. It explored how distractions, workspace flexibility, and personal control of work environment influences perceived job performance, job satisfaction, group cohesiveness, and the tendency to work alone or in an enclosed area. The study prompted a spirited discussion among members, especially about the issue of workplace choice.

What Does Research Say About Distributed Meetings?

This is an edited excerpt of a discussion on how distributed teams handle brainstorming and other idea-generating tasks:

Question: My team is working on developing guidelines for distributed meetings. I'm looking for your response to a specific question, the answer to which has eluded the members of my team: When engaging in creativity-based group work (brainstorming, ideation, etc.), and one or more of the participants are remote (unable to meet face-to-face with the others, but able to connect via technology), is it best to conduct the session entirely "virtually," where all participants "call-in," in order to level the playing field?