Support Workplace Detachment and Reattachment with Conversational Intelligence

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Support Workplace Detachment and Reattachment with Conversational Intelligence (2018)

This study looks at the benefits technologies (in this case, it is SwitchBot) can have in the workplace to create detachment and reattachment from work. They look at the effect SwitchBot has on workers. SwitchBot converses with workers to help them detach and reattach with their work at the beginning and end of each work day by looking at both task-centric and emotion-centric conversations to support those workers. Results showed that participants felt more productive and engaged during the first hour of work. Also, the participants amount of after-hour work emails decreased with the use of SwitchBot

Summary

SwitchBot had the ability to initiate emotion-centric and task-centric conversation. Their research observed that emotion-centric was seen as most effective compared to task-centric conversation. However, task-centric was seen as the most affective when workers reattached from work at the start of the day. These findings are important because detachment from work can lead to overall worker well-being and life satisfaction which can help to improve productivity. Since most of work has become virtual during the pandemic it becomes important to find ways to separate work and home life. SwitchBot could be one of the avenues to help distinguish home and work life.

Key Points

• The Effort-Recover Theory and Conversation of Resource Theory: “Individuals tax their mental and physically resources throughout the workday and are inherently motivated to regain the lost resources, otherwise if they continue to expand these resources they will never fully recover.” In other words, if workers want to become more productive, they need to avoid physical and mental work after hours.

Citation

Alex C. Williams, Harmanpreet Kaur, Gloria Mark, Anne Loomis Thompson, Shamsi T. Iqbal, and Jaime Teevan. 2018. Supporting Workplace Detachment and Reattachment with Conversational Intelligence. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Paper 88, 1–13. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173662