Abstract
Remote workers’ wellbeing has been mainly studied with competing survey methods and introspective indicators, yielding scattered, hardly comparable results. Work psychology, HCI, usability and writing process studies have developed some innovative indicators to study remote workers, but current research efforts rarely triangulate data to reliably derive new knowledge—especially from the scope of the remote workers’ cognition and wellbeing. Thus, the ongoing labor revolution towards remote working is mostly based on trial and error, often with mixed results. New consulting start-ups provide companies with guidance to switch to remote working, but they tend to focus on the control of the employees and their productivity, and they generally disregard the deep changes in the remote workers’ ways and in work setups. The landslide shift to remote working setups, due to the pandemic, crucially opened a unique window of opportunities. From a labor welfare perspective, it lets us study emerging behaviors in remote workers common to many job profiles, from healthcare providers to white collar civil servants. Remote workers’ add human value (e.g., expert analysis and decision making) to intensive information-processing tasks through HCI, often in multilingual settings. In 2022, more than 50% of the world's population is using the Internet ca. 7 hours a day—so, not only for leisure—and they reach contents in other languages daily. Gist machine translation is now part of people's everyday lives. Current tools to measure a few new indicators are often proprietary software, mainly for remote workers’ surveillance. Open-source prototypes are too generic, and combining them leads to clunky, unrealistic, and unreliable research settings and results. Social research inspired by situated cognition, like this project, demands non-invasive methods to access remote workers’ performance in their natural work environments and with full respect to their privacy. To do so, this project is creating Big Sistah, a research suite to study and to perform real-time monitoring of multilingual remote workers’ activities at their workstations to study their (1) profiles, (2) emerging working habits, (3) mental fatigue, stress, and motivation (through attentional changes), and (4) their impact on their efficiency (e.g., multitasking), efficacy (e.g., expertise levels), and productivity. The key contributions of our project are (a) to create or integrate a set of indicators and (b) to develop the technology to seamlessly collect data for such indicators at runtime. This should empower the scientific community with an open-source, interdisciplinary research toolbox to collect and measure remote workers’ data in real time. The suite consists of four modules, two as websites (Saga and Taylor), and two as actual desktop applications (Echo and Munio): • Saga is a research project management dashboard that lets researchers add team members and informants, group them and assign and schedule tasks. It also allows to create or adapt the informed consent form, implements several privacy protections and fine tunes and adapts tests ans surveys. • Taylor is a portal to profile informants as to their cognitive and personal characteristics, with more than 20 cognitive tests (working memory, processing speed, task switching, WCST, etc), and more than 10 surveys (NASA-TLS, personality Big Five, etc), plus their typing skills and their command of the languages they use. • Echo is the cross-platform (Win, Mac) data-collection application, that may combine keylogging, screen-recording, and audio recording. It also lets informants perform cued retrospection immediately after tasks. It stands out for a precision that lets researchers use it for reaction times, and for being independent of text processors. It works with all languages, registering both the keyboard output and the screen input. • Munio is the researchers’ module fo
Dettagli del progetto
Responsabile scientifico: Ricardo Munoz Martin
Strutture Unibo coinvolte:
Dipartimento di Interpretazione e Traduzione
Coordinatore:
ALMA MATER STUDIORUM - Università di Bologna(Italy)
Contributo totale di progetto: Euro (EUR) 201.271,00
Contributo totale Unibo: Euro (EUR) 110.695,00
Durata del progetto in mesi: 24
Data di inizio
15/10/2023
Data di fine:
28/02/2026
