As the amount of workers being moved towards remote workdays has sharply increased due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become much easier for workers to fall into isolation as more difficulties arise regarding how workers interact during the workday.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of knowledge workers across North America have struggled to move their work lives online. Although teleconferencing, email, and other internet tools have allowed teams to stay connected, we discovered that employees are feeling more disconnected than ever. How might we improve remote interpersonal connection by recreating the way workers interacted in the office?
Many companies have had to find new ways for workers to communicate, and using platforms tested before the pandemic has been the quickest solution. This spares the time required to find and introduce new platforms to a company's workflow.
However, as usage of these platforms increase, the amount of users that say video calls help them feel connected has plummeted. 95.1% of our survey respondents (87 participants) mentioned it was difficult getting to know coworkers remotely, with awkwardness, inconvenience, and availability confusions being listed as main reasons.
Wörkestra is a desktop and mobile app that allows remote coworkers to see and hear each other’s keyboard and mouse clicks. We want to discover how teams can be more present with each other over given their removal from the office. Wörkestra aims to help reduce workplace isolation by creating a more informal and delightful way for teams to connect throughout the workday.
Wörkestra can be used in its minimized form on the current or separate monitor for workers to see what their coworkers are up to. The goal is for this application to display within the worker's peripherals to support meaningful interaction while not distracting them from their work.
With limited customization options available in platforms such as Zoom, Google Meet, and Slack, I wanted to emphasize the importance of self expression, especially within the remote workplace, and introduced a system for customization. These instruments act as an extension of one's personality, which is especially beneficial when workers may not have even met their coworkers in person.
When working away at pushing changse to Github, grabbing an elote for lunch, or just about anything elseW Wörkestra will push an associated emoji to typed words onto the UI to let others know what you may be up to.
This is a unique opportunity for coworkers to better know when you may be available in a casual manner, allowing for better scheduling of work/non-work related events or tasks, such as taking a lunch break over Google meet, or setting up a daily standup.
We made a way for coworkers to build social support, create opportunities for collaboration, and establish a sense of community at a distance—similar to short watercooler chats in the office. These moments foster respect and familiarity within teams and across departments, allowing colleagues to better seek information, opinions, and guidance in ways that are spontaneous and personable.
With these conversations comes better feedback across the team and company, a healthier and more productive work environment, and more successful collaboration over time.
Team leads can take charge of day-to-day work pacing by adjusting the tempo throughout the day to fit the type of work being done, all while active productivity. Doing a team sprint over the next few hours? Crank up the tempo! When workers play back the sounds at the end of the workday, they can hear how changes in their daily workflow are translated into music.
As we pivoted to focus on the emotional aspects of human connection, I created two primary guiding principles through our research to ground our product, which emphasizes creating a pleasant work environment.
I chose to incorporate our human senses and prioritized the often overlooked properties of sound as an equal to our product's visuals. With the right balance of sound and visual design, we were better positioned to make an application that doesn't disrupt someone's daily workflow, but enhances it.
I consolidated the nuances of our data to create rich and inclusive archetypes. Do subjects have a separate and private working space or live alone? Are they financially equipped to sustain long-term remote work? Do they have access to reliable technology to accomplish their tasks? It’s important to consider environmental and dynamic social circumstances to understand how inequality presents itself in remote work.
As our key measure for this project was to bring joy and support remote workers, I constructed our primary archetype around a recent hire during COVID-19 with no prior experience in the workplace. Despite scheduling frequent 1:1s with her lead and coworkers, she finds it difficult to establish strong emotional connections with her coworkers. Being her first remote role, her fears are misinterpretations, unrealistic expectations, and working within a competitive junior culture.
After reaching out to three of my closest friends since our first project together in first year, we shared the same feeling: COVID isolation is rough. I didn't leave my neighborhood for six months since the start of the pandemic. It felt right to meet (virtually) and put together this project aiming to reclaim the feelings we get when we're physically together.
Remote work was a new experience for all of us. With help from a professor (now dean (congrats Carman!)), we navigated through failing wifi signals, broken calls, and an assortment of other issues to make a project we're all proud of.
