! ! ! ! Department of Product- and Production Development CHALMERS UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY Gothenburg, Sweden 2016 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! How to improve collaboration remotely - from a user perspective Master of Science Thesis in the Master Degree Program, Industrial Design Engineering ! MOA PARSLAND LINNÉA SÖDERBOM How to improve collaboration remotely - from a user perspective MOA PARSLAND LINNÉA SÖDERBOM SUPERVISOR: ANNELI SELVEFORS EXAMINER: OSKAR REXFELT CHALMERS UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY Department of Product- and Production Development Division of design and human factors Göteborg, Sweden 2016 Master of science thesis PPUX05 How to improve collaboration remotely - from a user perspective © MOA PARSLAND AND LINNÉA SÖDERBOM, 2016 Published and distributed by Chalmers University of Technology SE-412 96 Göteborg, Sweden Telephone: +46 (0)31-772 10 00 Printed in Sweden by Chalmers Reproservice Göteborg, 2016 Foreword We would like to thank all the stakeholders in the MERCO project that have supported us in many ways with their competence, optimism and ideas. Another great big thanks to our examiner Oskar Rexfelt and our supervisors Anneli Selvefors, David Gillblom and Ulrica Cullen that always brought valuable input to any given discussion and created new ways of thinking to avoid narrow roads. Also, we would not have been able to conduct this study without being so welcomed at the researched companies by all the employees, so we would like to send a big thanks to all employees and user study participants that patiently supported us throughout our field work. An especially big thanks there to Magnus Thor for helping us with the prototype and all his wisdom. Finally, thank you to friends and family for always being the best of support in the process. Abstract Remote collaborations in companies are today more frequently used as a consequence of increasing cross-national business and the benefits of cost, time and environmental impact reductions as a consequence. Nevertheless, it has been shown that remote collaborative meetings do not live up to the alternative of meeting in person in matters of effectiveness. The aim of this master thesis project is to investigate the remote meeting situation at two multinational, development companies and by the found data create a solution that supports remote collaboration. The project focus has been to identify existing user needs in remote meeting situations and to translate these into either a physical or digital product. The project has been carried out on behalf of Ericsson AB and Semcon AB and supported by several other stakeholders, part of the external project MERCO. The findings display the need for considering the social context and to challenge the existing meeting culture to facilitate collaboration and increase individual motivation within the meeting environment. The importance of facilitating and encouraging creativity and interaction throughout the meeting has been found as crucial when aiming for creating a collaborative environment remotely. Therefore, the final result of this master thesis project includes a framework with factors of how to enable informality within the meeting context, aiding designers and product developers how to work with informality as an important factor for facilitating communication. The project process has been carried out through literature and user studies several concept ideas were created as a result of the found user needs. By consulting meeting participants related to the concepts intended users and the MERCO objectives could one final concept be taken further into developing an early digital prototype, aimed for supporting the collaborative process when meeting remotely. The final developed concept is a software program that is supporting remote collaboration by including functions that supports increased interactivity and inclusiveness within the remote meeting. Functions to visually display participants even though the network connection is low, to capture important aspects within the meeting and allowing the participants to interact with the displayed artifacts during the meeting is some of the developed functions incorporated within the software. An early prototype was developed to test some of the functions during remote collaboration. Further development will be required to design more of the software program functions and to test it thoroughly. The project findings means to support the following MERCO project to take the software program to new levels of development and market adaption. Table of contents Foreword Abstract 1 Introducing the project 9 1.1 Background 9 1.2 Employer 10 1.3 Project description 10 1.4 Aim 10 1.5 Questions posed 11 1.5.1 Research questions 11 1.5.2 Driving questions 11 1.6 Definition of terms 11 1.7 Limitations 12 1.8 Project process 12 2 How remote meetings work 13 2.1 Methods and implementation 13 2.1.1 Literature studies 13 2.1.2 User studies 13 2.1.3 Affinity diagram 15 2.2 Remote meetings in theory and practice 15 2.2.1 Meeting, meeting types and contexts 15 2.2.2 Communication - why is it so important? 26 2.2.3 Individual and group dynamics aspects 32 2.2.4 Innovation through creativity 35 2.2.5 Available technology and features 38 3 The most important aspects in collaborative meetings 47 3.1 Methods used 47 3.1.1 List of requirement 47 3.1.2 Persona - A user group identification 47 3.1.3 Developing frameworks 48 3.2 Collaborating remotely 48 3.2.1 Developed list of requirement 48 3.2.2 Understanding the user group 49 3.2.2 Developed frameworks for remote collaboration 52 4 Concept solutions for 59 collaborative meetings 59 4.1 Creating concept ideas 59 4.1.1 Methods used to conduct concept ideas 59 4.1.2 Generated concepts and referred contexts 61 4. 2 Choosing the final concept 70 4.2.1 Methods used for evaluating the concepts 70 4.2.2 Final chosen concept 71 5 Final concept: evaluation and refinement 72 5.1 Final concept functions 72 5.1.1 Conversation mode 74 5.1.2 Text mode 78 5.1.3 Interactive mode 78 5.1.4 Presentation mode 80 5.2 Prototyping and user testing the final concept 83 5.2.1 Evaluation of concept functions 83 5.2.2 Prototyping final concept 88 5.3 Prototype result 91 6 The final product 95 6.1 Software interface and use 95 6.2 Software and related frameworks 102 6.2.2 Software functions relation to the communication framework by Cao and Östin (2015) 104 7 Discussion points 106 7.1 Methods and implementations 106 7.2 Project result and posed questions 107 7.2.1 Driving questions 107 7.2.2 Research question 108 7.3 Further development 109 8 Conclusions 111 9 References 112 9.1 Books 112 9.2 Articles 113 9.3 Websites 114 Appendix 117 8 9 1 Introducing the project This chapter introduces the framework and overall goal with the conducted master thesis project. The project process is described at the end of the chapter, which also is the process of how this report was written. 1.1 Background Effective teamwork often requires different competencies frequently collaborating and interacting with each other. Successfully performing advanced group tasks such as complex decision making, group ideation and team building is something that is of great importance for an effective teamwork delivery. As for today does such complex tasks requires physical presence for the participants and even though there exist net-based communicational remote tools such as teleconferencing, face-to-face meetings are still frequently used. This result in an increased need for transportation, which ultimately is becoming an environmental issue when the fuel used for these transportations are adding to global Co2 emission1. One of the reasons for still having the need to meet in real life is that the available technology for teleconferencing does not capture the full spectra of elusive information flows that take place in natural conversation2. Gestures that occur in such conversations could be for instance hand movements, facial expressions and glances, which unfortunately could be filtered out through using net-based communication. Moreover could such a non-aligned system of information where elusive parts are left out lead to a lack of efficiency in communication, simply as these subtle movements play a substantial role in cognitive input whilst communicating3. In order to reach efficient results in remote communication, three layers of space are according to MERCO required in order to reach a transferable system of information that are similar to a live meeting context; task, work and communication space4. The task space refers to the artifacts generated by the collaborative team such as drawings; whereas the workspace refers to the deictic gestures and references the speaker do to emphasize a meaning. The communication space concerns the verbal communication, the eye movements and more automatic body movements such as shrugging. By introducing technological components combined with adequate software that enables the transformation of these layers, the scope is to invent a product that can aid an interactive meeting context. The MERCO project, or Mediated Effective Collaboration as it is short for, was initiated in 2014 and is expected to be finished in January 2017. The project aims to solve the described scope above with help of shared competence of several stakeholders. This 1 Joireman et al, 2004 2 t2i interaction laboratory, 2015 3 Celtic-plus, 2015 4 Celtic-plus, 2015 10 master thesis is the second one conducted within MERCO with more thesis projects to come before the project is due. 1.2 Employer The employers for this thesis project are Semcon AB and Ericsson AB, being two of the collaborating parts in MERCO. One of the master thesis students is hired by Ericsson and one by Semcon. The MERCO project consists of several other parts as well, namely: Chalmers University of Technology, ETH Zürich, Intelliconcept AG, AVS Systeme AG and Touchtech AB. 1.3 Project description This master thesis project will investigate the possibilities of improving remote collaboration in business meeting contexts with emphasize on enhancing interaction between colleagues, focusing on doing so from a user perspective. A pre-study will be conducted where literature is consulted and user studies performed to find the core user needs during the remote meeting situations. An idea generation phase will be initiated with aim to develop several concepts, focusing on reaching a high innovation level in combination with satisfying found user needs. The developed concepts will be evaluated and one final concept will be chosen for further development. During this phase, the usability aspect will be of great importance and several user tests will be performed to evaluate the concepts based on factors such as user experience and user interaction. To be able to test and evaluate the different concepts, mock-ups and prototypes will be developed depending on the research need. The final concept will be presented in an early state as a digital or physical representation, which depends on the findings throughout the project. Above this, the project delivery consists of a final concept presentation and this project report. 1.4 Aim The aim of this master thesis project is to understand the phenomenon of real life meetings conducted at the researched companies and how they differ from meetings in a non-real life context and thereby identify the core needs when conducting remote meetings. Based on the user needs, the aim is to locate a concept solution to support the user during the remote meetings. The aim is also to realize the concept as a physical, digital or combined product to display how the needs can be met through a developed product. Furthermore the overall aim is to support future work within MERCO to document the project findings in order to act as a foundation for further development. 11 1.5 Questions posed The posed questions have been divided into research questions and driving questions. The later is the questions that has driven the project forward, to find the answer to the overall research questions. 1.5.1 Research questions How can the important and substantial aspects of communication be captured in a physical and/or digital product to support a creative meeting environment remotely? What core functions will such product contain and how could these be realized? 1.5.2 Driving questions What aspects of a meeting are important to consider with regards to the existing literature and conducted user studies, related to the research question posed? What type of business meetings is relevant to investigate with regards to the found aspects? What user needs are central when conducting a remote meeting? How is a creative, collaborative meeting environment created based on the findings above? 1.6 Definition of terms • Real life meeting - a meeting where all the participants are physically present. • Remote collaboration - when a group of two or more people is working for a common cause at the same time as real life meeting is impossible for at least one of the members. • Artifact - an object in a virtual environment, i e. PowerPoint, PDF, word document etc. • Site - the physical place from where the remote meeting is held. A remote meeting consists thereby, by definition, by least two sites) • Interaction – the activity of being with and communicating with others, also covering the way people react to each other’s behaviour. 12 1.7 Limitations The external stakeholders initializing the MERCO project developed the frameworks of this project. Even though this master thesis project stands alone from the work of MERCO the problem description was limited to fit the overall project goal. Moreover the user group was limited to involve the employees at the researched companies. The project prerequisites have also lead to limiting the project not to include the perspective such as culture, gender or age differences. The focus of this project has been to investigate remote meetings and therefore the limitations has been set to only include remote meetings within the user study and also to focus on the remote meetings during the literature study. The use context of the remote collaboration is limited to in-house meetings, i.e. between different sites within the same company. Limitations regarding the user studies have also been done to focus on real-life meeting situation with 2-15 participants in a limited number of meeting sites (maximum 8 different sites). 1.8 Project process The structure of this master thesis project is based on the product development process. Initially, a pre study has been conducted to locate user needs and theoretical background on the researched topic. Then the data has been analysed and structured to provide a ground for the ideation phase. During this phase several concepts were generated and then evaluated based on the findings of the pre study in combination with the result from user tests. Based on the evaluation, one final concept was chosen and taken further for development. One final prototype was created to evaluate the final concept and to suggest further development for future work. The project plan can be viewed in figure 1.1 below. Figure 1.1 - The project process 13 2 How remote meetings work The study of this project investigates the user needs through theory and practice by consulting related literature that touches upon the relevant aspects of remote collaboration and through investigating how the meetings are taking place at the companies through user studies. The chapter is introduced by investigating the methods that were used followed by the results and analysis from theory and practice in separate chapters. 2.1 Methods and implementation During the pre study a great amount of data was gathered by the use of literature studies and user studies. The following section describes how the data was attained and sorted during this process in order to be analysed for future project steps. 2.1.1 Literature studies An extensive literature study was initially performed to attain information on theories and previous studies on the investigated subject. During the reading sessions, summarized notes were taken continuously to store all the information input. The literature was mainly found by the search engine Google scholar and through Chalmers University’s library. Search phrases used: Meeting and meeting structure, remote meeting, business meetings, behaviour science, communication theory, impact of body language and nonverbal cues, informality at workplaces, digitalization of workplaces, online gaming, commute environmental impact, group dynamics. User experience, mental model, designing user experience for the web, online gaming culture, theory on creativity, innovation, curiosity, interaction design, collaborative environment design, user interaction, user testing. 2.1.2 User studies The user studies have been conducted iteratively throughout this project. This chapter describes the initially conducted user studies that provided the foundation for further research. Observations Five real time observations and five recorded videos from observed meetings were included in the pre-study. All of the observations were of a non-participating matter. Observational research as a method means to observe on going behaviour at a designated place, in this case the two researched companies, to obtain insight in a certain user 14 situation5. The notes taken during the observations were based on the communicational interaction during the meeting and the technology used6. The real time observations were recorded and notes were taken by the use of pen and paper. In the case of observing the video recorded sessions were the procedure similar. The notes concerned user actions, behaviour (group and individual) and acknowledgments from user errors and problems. Interviews Eight semi-structured interviews and several structured conversations were conducted to obtain qualitative data from corporate representatives with different competence and backgrounds. The interview outline can be found in Appendix 3.2. Semi-structured interviews were used because it allows the interviewee to steer the interview and thereby revealing the interviewees’ perspective7. The six of the interviews (interview 1, 2, 3, 6, 7 and 8) were conducted separately with persons working at one of the investigated companies in different departments. All interviewees had many years of experience regarding remote communication and were seen as expert users. The questions posted contained elements about the daily work, how they would like to work and what they saw as possibilities and obstacles when it comes to technology and early ideas for concept directions. Interview 4 and 5 was conducted with employees at two external companies and the interviewees were described as experts in remote collaboration at the different companies. As mentioned, above the semi-structured interviews were several structured conversations held with people within the user group. The reason for this was to gain valuable insight of the user need and perspective in an informal and iterative way. Focus groups During the ideation phase, three organized focus groups were conducted. The participants that took part in the focus groups was identified as lead users which is users that early has experienced needs for a solution and may have tried to work around the existing products to satisfy this need8. Focus group as a qualitative method is used to encourage unfiltered thoughts and opinions on a specific subject. The session is steered by a focus group leader, making sure the conversation is held within the investigated topic9. The first focus group (focus group 1) was carried out at another development company with four participants whereas one person of these was attending by teleconference. The aim for the session was to discuss how the participants experience the teleconferencing tools and aids that they work with in their everyday working life and to hear what they might or might not want to see in the future10. By receiving information from another 5 Kawulich, 2005 6 Appendix 2.1 7 www.qualres.org, 15-12-09 8 Ulrich and Eppinger, 2000 9 Johannesson et al, 2004 10 Appendix 2.2 15 company that could be compared to the previous companies’ experiences as well as identify similarities that could lead to a potentially stronger concept foundation. Last, two focus groups at one of the researched companies were conducted with a similar structure, both including four participants to discuss the developed ideas and early concept solutions and to investigate attitudes. At the beginning of the sessions, some of the solutions regarding the investigated subject was presented and the participants was allowed to discuss around these presented ideas 2.1.3 Affinity diagram The data collected during the pre study was sorted and analysed with use of an affinity diagram. The method was developed by Kawakita Jiro in 1953 and is used to organize large amounts of written information, which in this case are all the notes of the attained data. The procedure is to print and organize all the information onto separate notes, group the notes that were handling the similar user issue or aspect of the meeting. Within each category were data then grouped into sub-groups dependent on what named user issues the data was relevant to11. The following categories emerged: Meeting, meeting types and contexts, Communication, Innovation and creativity, The individual and group dynamics aspects and Available technology. These categories have been the foundation of the next chapter, were all the data is presented. 2.2 Remote meetings in theory and practice In this chapter data from the literature study, observations, interviews and focus groups is presented. The categories of the literature study are the following; meeting, meeting types and contexts, communication, innovation and creativity, the individual and group dynamics aspects and available technology. Derived from the result of the affinity diagram. The data is analysed in relation to the relevant chapter in order to give an insight of what has been found for the following work. 2.2.1 Meeting, meeting types and contexts The overall purpose of why persons meet, the benefits of the event and how meetings differ in context and type is in this chapter discussed. It is crucial for the designer to understand how the meeting incorporate a web of communicational acts, which thereby put requirements on technological development. The first section of this chapter, the meeting, investigates how these acts are related as a consequence of complex social patterns. This leads up to the second section of meeting types, categorizing commonly occurring meetings and their characteristics from theory and empiric results. Different meetings create unique needs that put requirements on technology, which here will be 11 Cheng and Leu, 2011 16 investigated. This will likely also differ when you do the meeting on remote, which flowingly will be elaborated in terms of differences and similarities between physical and remote meetings. It is also likely that the quality of the meeting and how the actual effectiveness is perceived can be related to the organizational matters from a managerial level. The management’s role as a meeting mediator and initiator as well as supporter in the collaborative process is here also brought up. Finally, the context of where the meeting takes place is suggestively having an impact on the quality of the meeting itself, which this section will aim to determine in ways of how and why. The meeting A meeting can be looked upon as a powerful tool to exchange information, solve problems, resolve conflicts and inspire others. The term meeting can be defined in many ways. One definition Alan Barker (2011) uses to describe a meeting is “A meeting is a group of people purposefully thinking together”. The definition shows the different aspects to consider regarding a meeting; a group that is thinking together, with a purpose. A meeting is a complex phenomenon and to fully understand it, one must consider the many aspects of the meeting context. Instead of looking at the meeting as a ‘blank slate’ one should consider the meeting as a gathering that beforehand is influenced and therefore the conditions for each meeting differ12. To attain a meaningful meeting one has to consider the meeting structure. Meeting structure is here referencing to a number of participants, purpose, agenda, place and time frame. The number of participants within a meeting is recommended by Barker (2011) not to include more than 12 people because the occurrence of sub-groups and the difficulty to manage many people at once. When starting up a meeting a clear agenda is crucial; the lack of one may prevent a systematic approach of capturing the meeting. This could lead to information loss, which could devastate a project due to the consequence of poor decision-making13. Another aspect is that it’s important to know when not to have meetings, as the definition reads: meeting with a purpose. Thus during one-way communication it is typically not necessary to call for a meeting but instead use another type of communication method. The observed meetings (1-10) had implemented the required meeting structure in various extents. An example of an unclear mediator was during observation 2, where no secretary or designated mediator was observed and instead an informal meeting leader guided the other participants. In observation (8) eleven persons participated on site, having side conversations appearing more frequent than throughout other observed meetings with a smaller quantity of participants. The meeting was however appearing as successful. The authoritarian mediator is suggested being the reason for why the meeting succeeded, as she was skilled in turn taking, fast decision-making and mediating between different parties. The importance of having a clear mediator role is here outlined in terms of having the responsibility of leading, act and division. 12 Schwartzman, 1989 13 Emmit and Gorse, 2009 17 The mentioned meeting (8) did also have a clear agenda, which was displayed for all the participants early on. Not all meetings that were observed had an agenda, but it could be considered useful in especially the bigger meetings where many different stakeholders would collaborate. It was often sent out beforehand but not always presented verbally, which consequently could be beneficial for the remote sites. One person in focus group (4) mentioned that occasionally would it be beneficial to know when a certain point on the agenda is presented due to the fact that not all participants always have an interest in the meeting as a whole. Something that suggests that the meeting should be better structured with inviting relevant competences at certain agenda points if their contribution is only desired there. In some observations the objective of the meeting was stated at the beginning of the meeting. For example did this occur during observation (1) were the mediator stated: “I called for this meeting with the aim to...” while another observed meeting (observation 7) was cancelled because no one attended. One of the participants that waited for the meeting to start exclaimed: “Why are we even having this meeting? I don’t even have anything to say”. The fact that this occurs indicates how the purpose of the meeting is not always clear to the participants itself, and that some meetings are conducted habitual rather than when actually needed. An example of how the meeting place and time frame was implemented in the researched companies was described in interview 2 as being insufficient. The interviewee stated: “Often you book a full hour by standard, but it is rarely that an entire hour is required”. During focus group (2) the participants discussed how it was hard to get booked meeting rooms and that they often was unavailable. The inflexibility of the meeting administration is once again displayed by this section. Two different interviewees (4 and 5) lifted their company trend of having more flexible meeting places, not being stationed at a specific meeting room but instead having alternative meeting places and also increasing the allowance for employees to work remotely. Interviewee 4 describes how they are implementing this within their company policy to introduce the term “DNA - Det nya arbetslivet” (translation: The new work life”) and interviewee 5 describes the same phenomenon by using the term “Mobile worker”. The first company is stating regarding the term DNA that work is no longer a place but something you do14. Above the failure of implementing structural aspects like a meeting structure, Barker (2011) states that the reasons to why meetings fails most often are that they are either unnecessary, possess unclear objectives, include the wrong participants, is held within a poor environment or with poor timing. Risto Puutio (2009) mentions another aspect of the meeting; the unarticulated targets of the meeting, namely hidden agendas. These two-sided tasks affect the way the participants behave and act and this is therefore an aspect to take into account then analysing the interaction during the meetings. During interview 2, the interviewee described that the worst kind of meeting was the meetings that you were not suppose to attend to but you don’t notice it until the meeting 14 microsoft.com, 15-11-01 18 starts. Focus group participant (4) describes the occurrence when only wanting to participate during a certain point of a meeting, then not wanting to attend more. “You practically just ‘sit off the time’ the rest of the meeting”. The frustration of not having an insight in how the meeting is related to ones owns competence is here apparent. It could through this be suggested that the purpose of the meeting itself is inflexible and that the relevance of the whole meeting is not always related to the individual contribution. At the observation of meeting (7) the purpose of the meeting appeared as unclear to the persons and they were asking each other out loud: “Why are we even having this meeting?”. A similar experience was later observed in meeting (10). This exemplifies the importance of having a clear pre defined structure of the meeting but in combination with previous findings; also a need for being able to change these structures throughout the meeting. The situation of meeting (7), as mentioned, even led to a cancelled meeting before it even got started. One participant in observation (7) commented that they must be more prepared for their meetings and pointed out: “Last time was a disaster, everybody talked at the same time without structure”. Not only was the meeting not prepared with a dedicated purpose, it also became a negative event for the participants. Later on in the project, during observation (10) the same group met again and one participant stated: “I don’t want to cancel these meetings, even though you feel they are unnecessary, because it’s so hard to book meeting times”. The statement implies that there is a need for arranging meetings in other ways than in the traditional sense but that the participants do not know how. The risk of not meeting at all is seen as worse than conducting an inefficient meeting. This section displays the need of providing easy means to meet within the business context, something that is considered being complex today. The meeting culture is set to habitual ways of working which are hard to change and especially through the solid culture that has been developed around it. Through facilitating the users with new ways of arranging and booking the meeting it is believed that the unnecessary meeting situations could be helped. Doing so would require both new ways on a managerial level to introduce other ways of working in combination with having an easier access to the tools for the arrangements. Meeting types There are various ways to categorize the different meetings, one categorization describes the six most common meeting types by looking at the goal of the meeting, which also is used within this research: (1) information sharing meetings, (2) status update meetings, (3) decision making meetings, (4) problem solving meetings, (5) innovation meetings and (6) team building meeting15. The ways to meet within an organization can according to Braun et. al. (2001) vary but more frequently applied meeting types have previously shown to be the informal, face-to-face meetings, the formal meeting and informal telephone conferences. This despite making it more cost efficient to have a telephone conference in combination with exchange documents. During the observations the most common meeting type was the status update meeting (observations 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8) and second most common was information sharing meetings (1, 2, 10). Decision making meetings occurred during observation (8 and 10). Innovative/idea generation meetings were occurring during observation (2 and 9) and 15 Meetingsift, 15-09-28 19 observation (1) showed an example of a problem-solving meeting. A majority of the observed meetings (observation 1, 2, 6, 8, 9 and 10) were having influences of other or switching totally between different meeting types. By acknowledging this it is believed that technology should also have the ability of doing this easy adaption between meeting scenarios and thereby aid the users better to make such shifts. Informality Above previously mentioned theories about meetings the type could vary in degree of formality. The factors that influence the degree of formality of a meeting have shown to be the agenda, the process, the location, time and duration but also the participants’ social and organizational relationships16. However, the perceived degree of informality has a lot to do with how well acquainted the persons in the group are with each other beforehand and how well their social relations are grounded. According to Emmitt and Gorse (2009) do people that are aware of the social framework in a context and thereby are able to relate to the person they are talking to have a tendency to become more engaged in the groups’ relation. Enabling the person to commit to the task in a better sense. If the persons have not established these connections messages would serve mainly as information providers, leading to the interpretation of connected behaviour as being acceptable or not in a whole different way. Mostly since the persons would have less knowledge of the other parts behaviour and personal traits and therefore have less understanding of them. When having an informal relation or creating an informal situation leading to such relation it could on a next level basis create a common ground of understanding of the other person. Consequently this would lead to achieving better communication and thereby faster and more effective results17. During both focus groups and interviews (focus group 1 and 2, interview 1 and 2) participants described that it was easier to collaborate when one was familiar with the other meeting participants. During focus group (1) the participants discussed how the collaboration and teamwork was affected negatively by not having met or seen the other team members. One of the focus group participants expressed communication issues due to as he describes: “When you’ve never met a person, and only talking in the phone, it is very hard to anticipate what’s coming next in the conversation. I don’t have that problem if I’ve met the person because then I understand how that person acts”. Informal situations create a common ground of understanding each other and a better relation to other people. In a group this leads to a more easy-going communication, which could result in handling negative emotions in a better way. The literature states that to informally meet before and after the actual meeting could also enhance the ability to express emotions such as giving feedback that is either positive or negative. Through being able to repair and rebuild relationships in the meeting from having this open climate the efficiency of the meeting could be improved in a positive way18. Interviewee (2) states that he has no need for visual feedback of the other sites at all, he also explains that he has worked within the same project group during several years. Also, observation (1, 4 and 9) shows examples of interactive meetings without visual feed, during all of the three referenced observations the participants stated that they had 16 Braun et. al., 2001 17 Emmitt and Gorse 2009 18 Emmitt and Gorse 2009 20 frequent contact and knew each other well. Communication was solved either by having one single speaker who addressed the turn or the speakers were few and knew each other well. When the participants knew each other they would seemingly connect faster and establish a common ground for continuous work. In observations (1 and 9) was this extra apparent. The working pace was fast and efficient and was brought further by a mediator. The already established relation was evident through mentioning each other’s names, asking questions more directly and having a more relaxed body language. Despite some communication difficulties did the participants solve their tasks quickly and did not lose track of the agenda as well as having short communication loops between turns. Moreover, observation (2 and 5) shows examples of low interaction and trouble understanding communicational cues. The observed participants did not know each other well and the familiarity was seemingly non-existing. The audio transfer as communication channel could not cover all the communicational acts in the room, nor did it bring the participants closer together even after talking for a while. This displays how the social grounding generates a communicational interplay that is sufficient enough through audio and that this works as the only communication channel if persons get a chance to socialize informally as well. The understanding of the groups and individuals behaviour can be considered as a cause to this as the result has shown that the social understanding of that enables better understanding through visualizing the other person. According to Anne-Laure Fayard and John Weeks (2007) can informal interactions not be planned for: they simply occur. However, the likeliness of their occurrence could be influenced through indirect means. Architectural factors have shown to impact how well an informal tie could be generated. This could further be divided into two different areas: the centrality of space and the enclosure/openness of space. Moreover has the flow through the space also an impact on how well informal ties can be created. When speaking of centrality this could for instance mean that the placement of a coffee room is centrally located in the office environment, which enables more people to access it with ease. It is thereby believed that the change of visual cues could impact the formal setting in the meeting room with subtle means. Both open and enclosed spaces have shown in individually performed studies to provide more or less informality, indicating that the social setting plays a huge part as well as what the environment affords. Farad and Weeks (2007) speak of how different personalities prefer different environments. What the environment afford its users in matters of for instance visual objects therefore also consequently affects the informality. When entering a space the queues of that area might afford the person into certain behaviour. These queues could be unknown for the user until they are changed through re-designs, thereby emitting a new behaviour. Affordances are interpreted through the meaning they have to someone and how the use is related to that, this adds to the physical description of affordances as being a functional indication for our perception about the object19. In all of the observed meetings (1-10) the meeting environment and used technology were the same. It consisted of a traditional meeting room with a large table, chairs and often an external screen to view an artifact on. The used technology had no room for 19 Farad and Weeks, 2007 21 individual changes or adding own character into the virtual meeting room except for inserting own profile picture in the used teleconference software. This was however seldom used. As most meetings were held on teleconference would therefor the visual feedback of the person get lost, making the visual space insipid in terms of social interplay. Enclosed spaces architecture can be related to theories about privacy in a sense that persons prefer to communicate informally when they feel that they can control the boundaries of their conversation20. Privacy acts physically as a perceived result of the visual and auditory isolation of a space. This could be done architecturally through designing a room with surrounding walls, closed doors, windows and so on. Enabling the flow of persons through the overall environment to be kept out. When it comes to the design of private areas there is also a social dimension. Here would norms and social meanings of the actual space of course impact a lot in matters of how private it actually is perceived. On a cognitive level this could be described as privacy having a spatial and temporal dimension. Spatially, as when two persons talks in private which would require them to feel confident that there is someone listening whilst talking as well as not having others overhear the conversation. Simply as the conversation could lead into more sensitively oriented directions21. This might also be the case why the capture of informal meetings through video previously have failed, as persons did not want to feel observed when informally interacting. Focus group participants (3) describe the importance of having own space when using an interactive tool, one of them states: “I don’t want all my ugly drawings to be visual directly for everybody”. The same matter is stated regarding meeting notes: “I want to be able to make notes for myself, they are probably stupid sometimes and that is not something I want to share”. That the private feed was displayed led to that they did not feel comfortable with sharing their screen. The ability to still be private when the situation requires should of course not be taken away, even though communication opportunity could be facilitated through doing so. The interface could however better support users into being reminded of how the activated video actually aid them into receiving and giving a more truthful information flow in terms of communication. Facilitating that process for oneself and others. The temporal dimension concerns when a person prefer to interact and is mentally ready for the informal interaction. Some persons are perhaps not desired to interact with whilst others are highly prioritized. When forced to interact when not being prepared would consequently lead to that the feeling of privacy is lost22. One participant in focus group (1) stated that: “I am definitely having less contact with the team members on the other sites, you don’t want to call and risk disturbing them”. Focus group (1) continued to discuss the importance of having quick dailies and another participant explains that he believe the project members are more efficient if having the opportunity to connect spontaneously. He stated that: “In our project team we have frequent contact throughout the day because we sit next to each other, I believe that has been really helpful for our work”. Interviewee (4) also described the phenomenon of how the surrounding is affecting the meeting situations by stating: “If you have a natural way of meeting with your team members it minimizes the thresholds to initiate contact.” A politeness and modesty about the other remote sites 20 Farad and Weeks, 2007 21 Emmitt Gorse, 2009 22 Farad and Weeks, 2007 22 activities is here displayed and suggests that with a more formal relation the threshold for initiating the spontaneous contact will become harder. It is also brought up how the closer and more informal contact with the colleagues improves the work for the employee and that the work situation should aid such communication in an easy manner. Bound and Middleton (2003) states that informal networks contribute to a majority of the knowledge received at the workplace. It has through the same study been shown that lack of causal conversations within a company leads to less informal learning and less socializing. According to Hirsch-Kreinsen and Jacobsson (2008) is this especially applicable to how sticky information is shared; i.e. practical knowledge that could be described as explicit or implicit. Explicit practical knowledge could for instance be design drawing and specifying requirements whereas implicit could be experiences and routines on how to solve problems. Moreover have informal ties shown to contribute to the establishment of better formal outputs, meaning that the actual formal meetings could benefit in their effectiveness and output quality from having these relations23. So, if informality aids the formal work it therefore also should be seen as crucial how the effectiveness of the remote company is improved in this way. The now taken for granted social ease of informality should therefore through design be enhanced and supported in the remote collaboration context. Open spaces architecture relates more to the theories about propinquity and thereby saying that informality is generated in spaces that bring people closer together, having a steady flow. Consequently this could also benefit from being a centrally located space, as this would be easier accessed. Spaces like these could be as mentioned a dedicated area such as the coffee room. Open space architecture is related to the theories about propinquity, which can be seen as a function of proximity and social frameworks. Propinquity concerns when persons are located at the same place with equal opportunity and social obligation. If this is modelled in a proper way there could be a socially beneficial situation where informality is generated and persons interact in that sense. However, when two people feel that they are forced to interact with each other it instead becomes an interaction obligation. As persons are physically close to each other with no easy escape it could be seen as an almost mandatory interaction. Interaction obligation have a highly cultural dimension to it which means that the feeling of obligation that you have to interact with someone when standing in an elevator for instance would differ with nationally, regionally and ethnically different traits24. Remote meetings As mentioned above is the electronic meeting, also known as remote meetings, one of the most common meeting types in business contexts and is of course a central aspect in this project. All of the observed meetings (1-10) and focus group (1) included at least one remote site. The occurrence of this type of meeting is continuously increasing because of the resources it saves due to traveling time and costs as well as the environmental aspect. Technical aids are required to assist the meeting and the most common technology used is visual and audio transfer in form of instant message and/or video- and telephone 23 Pavit, 2005 24 Farad and Weeks, 2007 23 conference25. According to Cao and Östin (2015), most commonly, the remote meeting was held with several sites at once where all of the sites were using the same kind of equipment (a laptop computer and sometimes an external screen). Similar setups were used in the observations of this project where most meetings with a computer, microphone and often connected to an external screen. 7 out of 10 observations were held on teleconference without video. Interviewee 5 states that there is an increased need for mobility and that today's meetings are insufficient. The company Cisco who is developing remote collaboration tools describes that 62 percentage of todays employees work in multiple locations and that it is crucial to ensure that these employers productivity by making sure that they always can connect, to each other or to gain information - at all times26. Interviewee (2) states: “You practically must meet at the beginning of a project, otherwise the communicational aspects is really hard because you have no sense of who you are speaking with.” Observation (5) confirms this through having one participant expressing the will to meet with the remote party ‘to shake hands’ after the meeting. This even though they were in fact meeting remote as she said it. The difference between remote and real-life meetings is here displayed and highlights that there is still some situations that require persons to meet in this way. When managing a remote meeting the mentioned meeting structure becomes even more important. One basic four-part model on how a remote meeting should be managed includes: opening, subject introduction, interactivity and review. At the opening of the meeting, all the participants should be included and preferably be able to introduce one self because if doing so the barrier of interaction later on is lowered. To introduce the subject is mentioned by Barker (2011) to be necessary so that all the participants grasp the meaning of the meeting, which increases the success rate of the meeting. The interactivity is of great importance when conducting a remote meeting. When not being collocated it becomes more crucial that the participant is active during the meeting in order to not lose focus. And last, to review the meeting afterwards provides the participant an opportunity to follow up and affect the meeting situation, creating a more effective meeting environment. The remote meeting context is affecting the participants as it makes them more aware of space and distractions but also of silence and participation during the conversation. It is also easier to ‘tune out’ during virtual distance meetings since the participants often don’t meet on a regular basis. This might jeopardize the deliverables because the participants are not becoming as engaged in the meeting outcome as if they were set in the same location27. The following traits of the participants are described to facilitate the meeting situation: • personality trait of social butterflies • possess organizational skills • be able to manage time across dimensions 25 Barker, 2011 26 cisco.com 15-11-01 27 Settle-Murphy, 2013 24 • be able to use tech-tools with ease • possess good listening skills • be able to ignite their own spark As mentioned, during some observations no clear person was designated as a mediator. Though during observation (2), one participant came forward as a meeting leader by introducing the meeting subject and managing turn-taking, which is behaviour connected to the personality trait of a social butterfly. The mentioned meeting was observed having short communication loops and high level of interaction. Sellen (1992) states that when using technology for remote communicating, some information loss in various degrees appears which makes communication more difficult. To understand how this affects the meeting one must look into the phenomenon of communication. Cao and Östin (2015) presented a framework for effective remote communication during meeting situations. The framework involves the following ten factors: • perceive others’ presence, roles and relations • accessibility of use and adapt to workflows • sufficient means to visually view the entire workspace • sufficient means for participants to track where sounds originate from • support explicit- as well as implicit verbal communication • watching of other participants body movements and non-verbal cues • facilitate use of deictic- and representational references • provide feedback that communication has been perceived and understood • should be able to make eye contact with each other • facilitate full view and ability to manipulate artifacts During observation (1) the meeting participants knew each other well and had met in real life. The participants had different technical equipment (one had video and one only audio), they used the interactive tool in the teleconference system that allowed them to map ideas like during a brainstorming activity. The meeting communication was observed to be highly interactive and the participants held short communication loops. One of the participants said: “Why have we never done this before, this was really helpful”. During observation (9) the participants explained that they would want to start a brainstorming session but due to the remote sites presence they did not. This indicates a need for wanting to change between meetings that are hindered by having technical thresholds that makes the remote switch between meeting types inflexible. One participant during focus group (3) stated that: “You’re more prone to do other things if you know nobody is watching”. Another aspect of visual feed that was lifted during the pre study was the ability to make eye contact. During observation (1) the participant did not have any visual feed on the remote site and was staring down at his keyboard the entire meeting. In focus group (1) one of the remote participants was on a remote site and only provided by audio sound, and when he talked all of the focus group participants were looking down at the table or started looking at their computers. Low monitoring 25 behaviour and habitual working patterns are here apparent and displays how the visual feed plays a role as both a communication channel and as a provider of information of paying attention at the remote sites. In order to understood that messages have been received and understood that working process is crucial. To be able to attain fluent communication throughout the meeting, adding opinions and questions are valuable, strengthened by Emmitt and Gorse (2009). The social framework of the meeting must support the open interaction and discussion in order for this to be achieved. One can also draw the conclusion that if the participants is not aware of what is being communicated it decreases the focus to the other sites and instead draws one's attention to matters located near by, tempting the participants to start side-conversations. Therefore it is suggested that technology should help with increasing the ability to raise opinion, which consequently would make the user feel more encouraged and prone to interaction. If this can be achieved it is likely that the low monitoring behaviour could be helped. Organizational aspects of meeting There could be various ways of measuring the efficiency of a meeting held in an organization. According to Emmit and Gorse (2009) should the managerial concerns in a meeting context be the process (leading to an effective outcome), production (the qualitative result of the meeting) and perception (how the participants experience the previous mentioned concerns). In other words could this mean that the meeting is carried out in time and within budget with a perceivably desired result by the meeting parties. This is however not always the case. In order to reach a successful result in a meeting, certain communicational behaviour is mentioned. According to Emmit and Gorse (2009) who conducted a study with help of Bales IPA framework with over 1500 communicational interactions does successful groups use a broader spectrum of communicational acts. Emmit and Gorse (2007) state that successful meetings have more socio-emotional exchange as seen in the descriptive chart. To clarify it could suggest that the team has the ability to create, support and recover relations efficiently throughout the meeting as well as being able to show disagreement, questioning and follow up on recovering from conflicts. This would consequently lead to better results within project time and within budget. Moreover is it suggested that successful teams do evaluate, question, express and acknowledge information more rather than just putting information to the table without any discussion28. This could be seen upon as an interplay within participants, which is formed through having a better internal relation to each other. The project teams that were observed and had a more dynamic discussion throughout the meeting would appear to reach consensus faster, having more agreement and include more parties in the overall process. The managements’ role when implementing new directives are described by interviewee (4) as: “It is really important that the bosses starts with a certain behaviour if wanting to implement something within the employer's work, because then the employers follow that 28 Emmit and Gorse 2009 26 behaviour”. This suggests a need for managerial concern when it comes to lead the way at a company in order for changes to occur. 2.2.1 Section summary • When designing for remote meeting situations, one must consider the meeting structure: i.e. participants, agenda, objectives, place and time frame, to understand what type of meeting you are designing for. • It has been found that different meeting types and needs occur throughout the same meeting session It is thereby suggested that technology should possess functions to favor easy adaption between meeting scenarios and needs. • The social relations, the level of (in)formality, impact the meeting situation and the participant communication and is thereby suggested as an important factor to consider. • The technology that connects the participants in a remote meeting impacts the ability to communicate and interact, today often negatively. At the same time, aspects like social butterflies are lifted as an aspect that helps communication through remote meetings. It is suggested that the technology should aid the user to raise opinions, express emotions and to communicate in a more nuanced way to support the meeting situation. • Management possess an important role when implementing new technology or work patterns at a company. It is important to understand the company culture and management when wanting to develop a product that will be used at a certain company. 2.2.2 Communication - why is it so important? How the meetings’ participants communicates a message to the group is of course a very crucial matter, which has been shown to often be a root to misinterpretation on remote. This chapter investigates how the communicative traits of a group affect the overall contribution and ability to send and deliver messages. This is done through firstly describing communication as a phenomenon and what could be incorporated with that term in a broad spectrum. Aiming to give an insight in why communication can fail, and especially on remote. The other section describes ways of communication and how body language act as a part of that, digging deeper into the acts that provides a overall impression of what a person is aiming to communicate. Substantial parts that often are known to get disrupted on remote, more thoroughly described why in that specific section below. Communicational theory and practice Stated in the MERCO project description, one of the important contributors for enabling collaboration remotely is the communication space 29 . Communication is defined by Harrington and Lewis (2014) as “...an exchange of information and ideas between two parties. It can be exchanged verbally, nonverbally through body language or signage, or by written and electronic means.” According to Harrington and Lewis (2014) is the 29 Celtic-plus, 2015 27 communication facilitated if the communicating people are motivated to share and if they are part of an environment of integrity and trust. The conditions of communication to appear is that a message are sent, the message is received and then a response is given. During all of the observed meetings (observation 1-10) verbal communication was mainly used to communicate, in some of this occasions the verbal communication was complemented or reinforced by sending video feed or textual information (observation 1, 6, 8 and 10). The camera was turned off as the participants were feeling that the video did not add anything or simply felt that they were not comfortable with sharing their picture remotely. This indicates how the virtual environment must be de-dramatized so that the users can feel safe in the remote meeting situation. The conversation is the heart of the meeting. The way a verbal conversation is sent back and forward between the participants are called communication loop and include following eight steps: 1. Sender - The person who thinks something 2. Encoding - Thoughts are verbalised to spoken words 3. Medium - The word vibrations are sent through air 4. Receiver - Listener receives air vibrations 5. Decoding - Interpretation of the vibrations 6. Feedback - Provide input of message 7. Analysis - comparing the interpretation of feedback to original thoughts 8. New loop/end loop - Either the message is understood or the receiver needs more information30 The listener, receiver, of a conversation needs to be aware of the content, the unspoken content, the order of importance of the content and the degree of objectivity of listener towards conversation. It is also important for the listener to be able to decode the message and understand what type of factual (informative) and emotional (affective) content the message holds31. When communicating, the message must be clear and honest for interpretation and as a result the remote meeting is dependent on the technology used to transfer the messages. Literature has shown that during remote communication the verbal communication message is enhanced: making a silence more silent and side-conversation more disturbing. During the user studies the meeting participants often solved this by quickly interrupting the silence with follow-up questions. Moreover, it feels much longer during a remote meeting when a person is talking for a long time, which leads to poor attention to the message. To keep short conversation loops is of great importance when wanting to avoid these occurrences32. The communication during observation (1, 2, 4, 6 and 9) mainly consisted of short communication loops while observation (3, 5, 8 and 10) had longer loops and also longer pauses between each loop. In the meetings with shorter loops the meeting participants would seemingly be more engaged and more interactive. This 30 Barker, 2011 31 Harrington and Lewis, 2014 32 Wilson, 2009 28 highlights the importance of interaction in the meeting room and to keep conversation short. Technology is believed to have the possibility to aid the users with this in a more sufficient way. Another aspect above the conversation of remote meetings is the need to share and receive artifacts. Like the conversation, it is important that the referenced artifact is clear to the receiver. Also Chastine et al (2007) describes the inter-referential awareness and the lack of such during remote communication. The observed meetings would always have a secretary taking notes, which sometimes also included individual persons taking notes for own purposes. To document the meeting is of course important in order to remember and obtain certain important highlights. However, this did occasionally lead to making the secretary less focused on the communication part and being more silent. As theory describes, it is important with a steady flow of communication in especially remote meetings. It is thereby believed that the meeting itself in combination with technology could aid the participants to better enable them to interact in the meeting, making all included. In one of the conducted focus groups (3) the participants stated that it was often that you referenced to something by a nod or a shrug, which is not perceived by the remote site. In observation (5) one meeting participant was trying to explain what area of the artifact he was describing but the remote site did not understand him. For the presenting part it becomes hard in this situation to know if the remote participants have heard and understood what has been presented. It is therefore believed that the technological aids should help the users with capturing and transfer non-verbal cues, gestures, references, indications and feedback so that this is displayed in a satisfying way. If video feed is available it is believed that it could help with transferring this important information. Communication problems can be devastating for a project, the lack of communication or poor communication leads to misunderstandings and mistakes, which may lead to wrong decisions, loss in work force or lacking in motivation. According to Nancy Settle- Murphy (2012) certain communicational aspects would contribute to a desirable team achievement. The leader should therefore in matters of communicational contribution consider the following: • To actively listen to the participants of the meeting and know how and when to step in intuitively • To see the individual needs of every team member in order to provide appropriate communication vehicles and preferences • To ask the right questions with the understanding of how posing the questions differently affect the outcome of the answer33. During one of the focus groups (1) the remote participant accidentally interrupted the other participants during the conversations. The focus group leaders asked several times if the remote participant had perceived the question. The confirmation questions to know if the other site had perceived the others occurred multiple times during some of the observations (observation 2, 4, 8 and 10). The problem of sensing the tone and timing 33 Settle-Murphy, 2012 29 on remote is here illustrated and shown to be facilitated through asking frequent questions. It is believed that the technological tools could better aid the user in the situation to be able to enter the conversation through other means than verbally. Several participants (focus group 1 and 2, interview 6) stated that the communication would be facilitated if one could express communication through more ways than verbalization. Interviewee (6) described how only using verbal communication was insufficient since it made it hard to understand underlying messages and it was also difficult to have a proper turn taking within the conversation: “If only communicating by spoken words, you loose the information of non-verbal cues which makes it difficult to enter the conversation without interrupting the others”. The issue of not knowing when to speak was also observed during observation (1, 2 and 8) were the meeting participants interrupted each other several times. One focus group participant (3) describes how she avoids speaking when being on a remote site because it is difficult knowing when it is your turn. Moreover would it seemingly be hard to know who is speaking at certain points, especially noticeable in the larger meetings. This was observed in observation (3) but also brought up in focus group (1) and interview (2) as an issue. Further remarks would be the sensing of tone. Even though the persons knew each other the tone was occasionally misinterpreted. This suggests that it becomes harder to understand communication and messages and thereby misunderstand, if parts of the communicational transfer are missing. During observation (4) the meeting leader started by saying: “Let's go around the table as usual...” and everybody got to speak shortly about their tasks. This made it easier for all of the participants to join the conversation later and it was observed that many participants talked more frequently. This kind of turn taking and introducing was therefore perceived to counteract the LMB that could occur when no direct task or assignment is given to the individual in the meeting situation. A further observation during observation (5) would be that the individual presentations were very long, which would suggest waiting time for the other participants without any, at the time given, task. Consequently this lead to inattentive behaviour in the situation such as going through mails, looking away or down in the table and playing with their hair. The division of the turn has a clear problem and could be solved through assigning the mediator with a more outlined role to lead the meeting in a more satisfying way which also observations (4 and 8) shows could be done even with more participants. Technology should here aid the meeting though providing the right tools for more efficient meeting division, which supports the individual to raise opinion when the situation requires it and actively take part in the meeting. As previously described in the informality chapter do contextual barriers such as room décor and style of architecture also influence the communication by impacting the person's attitude. By observing these barriers one can develop the ultimate environment for communicating and by this create a climate for good communication34. One of the interviewees (8) explained that the main issue with not being on the same site as the rest of the meeting team did not perceive the same contextual environment as the 34 Harrington, 2014 30 rest of the group, which made it hard to feel present. The interviewee said: “I almost wanted to close my eyes and try to imagine the other meeting room” when explaining the feeling of sitting on the remote site during a meeting. To attain focus to the meeting can according to mentioned theories be done through isolation from surrounding disturbances as well as having the same information sharing and communicational tools available at both sites. During the observations, sounds would occasionally appear from the remote site suggesting they were sitting in a lively environment. That the experience derived from the meeting should be perceived as equal is here of concern, simply as it is today perceivably different as described from two sites, one being the mediator and one being remote, covered in observation (10) also supports (appendix 4.7). In order to make all participants feel equally included this should be in mind when developing technology (interview 4 and 5). The new way of working with more activity-based environments has shown in the interviewed companies (4 and 5) organizations to contribute to an increased use of different meeting spots as well as becoming an important aid when developing technology for remote users. By their programs of DNA and Mobile Worker the aim is to support users with work, no matter what location, in order to achieve a fulfilling meeting situation. The importance of conducting meetings with the right technological aids that can be used with less regard to location is hereby acknowledged for further work. This in line with considering that the experience from the meeting through technology should aim for being perceived as similar at all sites. Body language as a communicational act So far the verbal communication has mainly been the subject for investigation but when looking into the collaboration phenomenon it is also important to understand the gesturing and non-verbal cues that are used when communicating 35 . There is the language, which is the spoken words, the paralanguage, which includes the way to communicate the language such as tones and lastly there is the kinetics that concerns the facial expressions and body language. All these layers must be included if the receiver should receive the sender's message correctly36. Observation (5) displays how one of the sites participants are pointing at the computer screen, referencing to a specific part of the artifact, and the remote sites exclaims “Hold on, I’m not following what page you’re at right now” when not having any visual feed at hand. In observation (1) did the observed participant try to wrap up the meeting, which was not sensed by the remote site. The fact that communicational messages are sent out without being received in fully of course makes the interpretation of the message become limited and could lead to confusions and mistakes such as described. It is crucial that the remote collaboration tools can aid the communication process so that more than the spoken words can be captured and transferred in order for messages to be sent and received as intended. A major part of communication is delivered and retained by a person’s body language. Illustrators, which is when the body language is used to enhance a message, and adaptors, which is unknown body movements like scratching your nose or yawning, are constantly used when communicating and is facilitating the encoding of the sender message37. Above this, Burgoon et al (2014) describes the use of body language as a way to clarify 35 Celtic-plus, 2015 36 Poyatos, 2002 37 Burgoon et al, 2014 31 speech, for instance to describe someone's length by using both words and hand gestures. Regulators is a way to control other people's’ speech. To tell someone to stop talking for example by raising your hand is one example of a regulator. This is more of an intentional body language where a major of the described language is unknown for both the receiver and the sender but still impacting the communication message38. All of the participants during the remote meetings were sending a message by the use of their body language (observation 1-10). For example, in observation (1) one participant crossed his arms impatiently at the end of the meeting meaning to imply that he wanted to end the meeting, which the remote site didn’t perceive because the lack of video feed. One focus group participant (1) described that the remote site sometimes is excluded from jokes or is mentioned by non-verbal communication, by using facial expression or gazing at each other. The participant states: “Sometimes we look at each other if for instance we don’t understand or disagree with the remote site, but it doesn’t feel good doing so because the remote site doesn’t perceive those signs”. This indicates how an internal mentality of communication, where the persons who can meet in person have more communicative channels, internally (and unintentionally) excludes them selves from the remote site. The social connection with all parties, naturally built up when meeting informally, is here highlighted in terms of how it is needed for creating a collaborative ground. The influence of the informality of the meeting has been described. When studying the body language it becomes clear that the ability to use body language is affecting the degree of formality of the meeting. Unsatisfying use of body language and other non- verbal cues may result in a more formal meeting context39. When looking into the use of body language during remote communication gestures are often exaggerated and the movements are mostly turned towards microphones or cameras, as they are the input devices. Thereby some of the inter-personal interaction becomes impeded40. Moreover is establishing eye contact whilst communicating important in order to confirm when someone is attentive, ensuring that the message is received41. This is a natural feedback that takes place automatically in physical conversations. In comparison, cameras do often appear static and can therefore not be controlled by the observer on the other side of a remote meeting. Cameras are also often placed above the screen where the information is shared which leads to a display of the person as gazing slightly downwards. In focus group (3) it was mentioned that this could be enforced when not having any video on since persons felt less observed and then started multitasking. It is therefore important to acknowledge the role of the video feed as it provides awareness of when someone actually is there and attentive to the task as well as providing an attention point for the communicational acts. It is suggested in theory that when conducting meetings remotely participants often exaggerate the languages (both bodily and verbally). When visual feed is not provided, this of course impacts the ability to show the bodily exaggerations of what is communicated. Therefor should this be considered from two sides: On a managerial encouragement level to spur participants to use the video feed in early group 38 Hartley and Karinch, 2010 39 Emmit and Gorse, 2009 40 Settle-Murphy, 2013 41 Cao and Östin, 2015 32 development phases as well as designing the video feed to better aid the user with a clear representation of the remote site. 2.2.2 Section summary • Technology should support short communication loops to enable the user to transfer messages in an honest way and also to enable all participants to actively participate in conversations in order for attaining an interactive meeting climate. • A major part of the communication is delivered and retained by body language and non-verbal cues, it is thereby important that the technology supports these non-verbal communication channels. 2.2.3 Individual and group dynamics aspects The personal traits of persons might indeed affect the overall effectiveness of a team. The chapter of individual and group dynamics aims to investigate to what extent and in what sense this can be related to a remote meeting. Also looking at how the individual and group contribution as such can be optimized, starting off with the group and then moving on to the individual. The complexity of the social interplay that occurs in a team that work together is not easy to interpret, but theory and empiric studies have through this chapter shown that there is indeed a lot to be learned when it comes to developing collaborative tools. Group dynamics aspects As the definition of ‘a meeting’ states: a meeting is a group thinking together. Thus, to understand the phenomenon of the meeting the dynamic of the group must be understood. According to the group model by Tuckman there are four development stages a group goes through during a project. During each stage, different conditions for productivity and social relations are abled. The first stage, forming, is when the relations are tentative and to fit in within the group becomes of great importance. The next group stage is storming, which is characterized by conflicts and there are limited room to focus on the group task and productivity. If the group is able to manage through the storming phase they enter the next stage of norming. This is a phase where the group starts to focus on the task and performance instead of relations and individual impressions in the group. It leads up to the next phase of performing, which is the phase of high productivity and where the group members care about the group performance and task42. While evolving through these stages, the structure within the group is constantly developing and changing. The group structure is a complex, dynamic system that involves factors such as status, power, role, leadership and liking 43 . When looking at a group of remote collaboration the status and power within the group becomes of great importance. Research indicates that during remote collaboration status and hierarchy is exaggerated44. As often two or three persons would appear dominant in the remote meetings, clearly observed in (2 and 3), it could occasionally block out the more introverted. This effect 42 Barker, 2011 43 Barker, 2011 44 France et al, 2001 33 becomes extra apparent when being on remote as it gets harder to interrupt from the remote site, as previously described. If the technology then could aid persons to enter the conversation it is believed that the threshold for communication would decrease. The fact that formality may have an impact on the meeting, its members and their ability to be productive is apparent in the group behaviour in several ways. Looking at the group dynamic, one can see that implementing socio-emotional interaction during the early stage of the group development, during forming, provides a tool for the group to work effectively together45. Several focus groups (1, 2 and 3) discussed the importance of feeling a connection with the other meeting participants and how this could help to reach a common ground. This highlights the significant importance of socio-emotional interaction. Informality impacts in how people relate and interact with each other. If people feel that they actually know more of the person than just work related information it becomes easier to also be more open and relaxed, this is brought up earlier from the observations of already familiar groups compared to newly established teams. Several interviewees (1, 2 and 3) and focus group (1) would here highlight the need of spontaneity in the meeting situation, which was something they saw as helpful for the more informational acts. Theory highlights that informal interaction cannot be planned for but could however be helped with other means. Technology should therefore support the users into taking more spontaneous contact with their working team in a very intuitive manner. Similar to how they would encounter their colleagues at the office where you just go over and have a quick talk. The management of meetings also have an obligation here in order to create an inclusive climate for the involved participants so that this can be achieved. In interview (1) the interviewee explains that he has no need for seeing the other meeting participants while a participant within focus group (1) describes missing the function of visual feed of the others. The interviewee has worked in the same team for several years and has continuous meetings with the team members. The mentioned focus group participant describes that he is new at work and has just started to collaborate with a remote team member. Another interviewee (interview 2) is also stating that he lacks the visual feed from the other sites, he has a position that he often starts up new projects and the participants of his meetings are rarely the same over a longer period of time. However, having a more inclusive meeting climate can hopefully spur more feeling that their contribution is valuable. Inclusiveness is described by Hill (2014) as important when managing a creative work environment. In focus group (1) it was brought up that the meeting group should work more with combating exclusion of the remote sites as it occasionally tend to be a more open climate in the meeting room and that sometimes an internal ”we and them” mentality could occur. It was also brought up that it is important to feel trust and prepared for what the meeting is about, something that can be related to the theory about being in control. In line with this, the understanding of others and individual role in the meeting itself is, as previously mentioned, important to know if the meeting is relevant for one self to participate in. In focus group (1) the participants describes this as crucial when being on remote, as you need the information to be able to bring relevant information to the table. 45 Emmit and Gorse, 2009 34 Individual aspects When understanding the behaviour of a group, one must also see to the individuals within this group. Each individual is striving towards fulfilling the own well-being regarding; physical and mental health, emotional well-being, sense of belonging and sense of being in control and spiritual state. If the group satisfies these needs the individual will respond by strengthening it46. One theory that describes the difficulties with the behaviour that an individual may experience during remote collaboration is the theory of self-monitoring behaviour. The theory explains how some people within a group is more sensitive to how others perceive them and thereby has a high self-monitoring behaviour (here called HMB). These people incorporate trust in the meeting by asking many questions and showing participation, while the behaviour of low-monitoring people (here called LMB) is perceived as distant and hostile. Often, LMB is sprung out of multitasking such as for instance talking on the phone, texting or doing other work during the meeting. According to the theory it is especially important to counteract the LMB during remote meeting. By getting the participants involved early during the meeting i.e. introducing themselves, make necessary data and feedback available for all participants or encourage engaging communications, HMB is facilitated47. In all of the observed meetings the participants were at some point in the meeting engaging in non-meeting related activities. In observation (2, 3 and 8) it was unclear of how many participants that were present because of the high frequency of entering and exiting the meeting. During observation (2) one of the participants on the remote site took a call at his smart phone in the middle of the meeting, entered the door and did not come back until five minutes before the meeting was finished. This indicates how easy it is to tune out during the remote meetings and how this should preferably be prevented in order to achieve a sufficient interactive climate. Another aspect of behavioural issues during remote meetings is highlighted by the uncertainty reduction theory, URT. The theory states that when we lose the ability to communicate nonverbally an uneasy atmosphere is occurring, which may increase the degree of participant uncertainty. URT suggests asking questions more frequently and using collaborative exercises will reduce uncertainty48. Several of the meeting participants are displaying uncertain behaviour during the observations. Observation (3) shows an example of when a participant is keeping a monologue and only one other participant out of seven speaks during the entire meeting. In observation (2) one of the participants was frequently asking “Are everybody on board?”, “Has everybody understood?” and “Any comments or questions?” This contributed to a better meeting effectiveness and overall more interaction. It is here highlighted that the need for reducing uncertainty could in fact also be more apparent in the remote meeting situation as more obstacles of communicating are present. The fact that it becomes harder to interrupt when only having audio is also a matter to consider for later development stages. 46 Barker, 2011 47 Wilson, 2009 48 Wilson, 2009 35 Above this, different personality traits and roles of the individual will always affect the meeting situation and group constellations. Some individuals are more comfortable and outgoing than others; some more talented in turn taking, making a point, interrupt respectfully while others may contribute little to none in these aspects. As well as the group dynamic and development affect the members; each member and the different dominances are affecting the group. Moreover, different individuals correspond differently to information through different senses. Some persons can be more pervious for visual information while others are more auditory or tactilely conditioned. That one individual could be reading carefully from a power point and observe the body language whilst another is listening directly and a third is looking into his papers. Simply as the visual feedback is what one is used to, another being a good listener and the third liking to feel what is presented49. Persons could also have more or less of these traits combined, including smell and taste. The different traits of the users set the conditions for the further work of the project. Therefor should important actors be identified and described to guide the development of the final product. 2.2.3 Section summary • To enable all users to easier enter the conversation would favour the group dynamics and help the interactive behaviour. • Different users have different individual characteristics, which must be taken into account when wanting to create an inclusive meeting climate. 2.2.4 Innovation through creativity An important factor of collaborative work is innovation, being the aim for many project teams in terms of coming up with new ideas for how to solve problems and push technological limits. In this project, such teams are of most concern as they are the subjects of investigation through the MERCO stakeholders. Innovation has one important root out of several, and that is creativity. Without this very much taken for granted component in the collaborative sphere, it becomes very hard to come up with new ideas. Therefor, this section aims to investigate how creativity can be created in order to see how creative environments could be generated on remote. What is creativity? Richard Peterson (2001) describes creativity as occurring as “the first time a person has an original or novel solution. Peterson (2001) states that creativity must satisfy two conditions for being seen as creative; originality and purpose. If a product or a solution is seen to be both novel and to have great purpose for existing it is categorized as a creative idea. Peterson (2001) also describes several stages that are of great importance for facilitating creativity: preparation (to obtain information), incubation (to process that information), inspiration (finding a solution) and verification (evaluating the solution). Thereby, ‘working creative’ has much to do with the work process and how you behave on the journey towards a creative solution. In conclusion, it is important to facilitate the creative work process during the entire work process. 49 Fexeus, 2007 36 The individual can be motivated to work and think creatively by many different ways. One factor that helps creativity is when feeling curious. True curiosity is described by John Adair (2007) as being the desire to learn and provide knowledge. When thinking creatively, curiosity is stated to be an important ingredient in motivation. To develop curiosity it’s important to ask a lot of questions both when talking to others and yourself. By asking questions the individual becomes aware of what is known and unknown and is then triggered to investigate and learn about the unknown. But even though individual aspects as curiosity creates motivation and enjoyment during a task, there are more ingredients needed in order to achieve creative, innovative solutions. As stated in Collective genius do innovation not spring from nothing. The interaction and collaboration with others to create innovations is significant. ‘The single genius’ may exist in some rare cases but true innovation comes from a group of people that is provided with the right tools and conditions 50 . John Adair (2007) describes the importance of using pen and paper when being creative. Also providing the group with the right type of material for the task is here mentioned as being significant for the task outcome. Because the group members influence each other they need to be able to express themselves without limitation so others can interpret their ideas correctly.51 The participant at the remote site during observation (1) describes how he is interrupted in his work because he can’t find the right tools: “I want to find the pointer-tools to show you what I mean, but I can’t find it!” In observation (4) one of the participants was trying to explain which figure in the document he means to describe: “No, not that one, I think you are on the wrong page”. When constantly facing user errors, technical problems and a formal meeting environment the individual participant is being obstructed in his or hers creative process. This aspect is implying that the actual use and experience with the product could directly be connected with the ability of creating a creative environment and an individual motivation for being creative. Observation (1) above shows one example of how the participants are interrupted in their work, trying to explain an idea but not finding the right tools instantly but instead must interrupt the ideation and instead focusing on finding the proper tool to explain his idea. According to Hill are these obstacles working counteractive regarding the creative process and inhibits the creative work environment. Therefore it is suggested that the technology should aid the user different needs of expressing themselves, allowing thoughts to be communicated unfiltered and without obstacles. Creativity through management So far, the state of the individual and the collaboration of the group have been described as being important factors for creativity. But when continuing looking at how innovative products are being developed, one must see to the organization behind the group. To manage innovation is to provide the project group with the tools and also the project process that is required for innovation52. In Collective genius the importance of creating an environment where people feels included is described as crucial for innovative leadership to appear. This leadership of innovation will affect the project group and facilitate innovation and creativity. Looking at studies of work methods from Pixar 50 Hill et al, 2014 51 Adair, 2007 52 Hill et al, 2014 37 studios, that has managed to produce several innovative films time and again, the importance of ‘dailies’ where the project members becomes up-to-date with the project and ‘trial and error’. Linda Hill53 states that the following three factors needs to be included in an innovative organization: • Creative abrasion - the organization should encourage discourse and debates. The innovative solutions cannot appear without conflicts and diversity of thoughts. • Creative agility - the members should be able to quickly try and evaluate ideas, discovery-driven learning is here mentioned as significant. • Creative resolution - the decision-making should be patient and inclusive, to not exclude opposite ideas but instead build on a mind-set of ‘both and’ instead of ‘either or’. Interviewee (2) describes the issue with being unable to communicate with the remote site and describes that: “Then you work you ass off and then you have to re-do all of it after getting the feedback too late”. He explains that his work would be more efficient if he felt that he could introduce his remote colleagues in an earlier state in the process. The ineffectiveness that this comment illustrates displays a need for a reform where changes can be made in real-time more hands on and in an agile and easy manner rather than having these bottle necks of brief, feedback, adaption and update. Glover et al (1989) states that at least four different components is included for creativity to exist, that is the creative process, product, person and situation. In addition to this are certain important leadership skills for remote collaboration mentioned by Hill (2014) as being important for organizational creativity: understanding how to create credibility, knows how to influence without authority and engage, creates a safe environment, creative ways are found, which leads to effective collaborations and also; value different opinions. What has been seen during the observations is that two out of ten observation had outspoken creative aims (observation 2 and 9). All of the meetings were held within the same meeting room context with the same technical aids: making a call via Skype 4 business (S4B) by the use of own computer, sharing screen with a displayed artifact. This environment is not supported by theory as facilitating and encouraging creativity and collaboration. Only one of the observed meetings (observation 1) used the post-it/sketching tool in S4B even though several participants expressed the need for using sketch tools in S4B. To connect the three innovation factors that Hill is describing above; to feel encouraged to debate, to quickly evaluate or try ideas or to have an inclusive decision-making process is practically impossible during the observed meetings because of the rigid, non-existing or incomplete communication patterns and interactions. In the observed scenarios a creative remote meeting was regarded as almost impossible. One of the interviewees (1) expressed how he believed that most of his collaboration issues would be solved if he only had an interactive surface. But with the previous analyse in mind, this would probably not solve 53 Scientificamerican.com 15-10-01 38 the core issue since the foundation of cr