Though there has been an explosive rise in remote work arrangements since the Covid-19 pandemic, there is surprisingly little research on remote teamwork and its impact on creativity, productivity, and worker satisfaction. Meetings are a central feature of such teamwork. As researchers Anita Blanchard and Joseph Allen wrote in a 2022 article, 'Successful meetings lead to productive workgroups but we do not know why or how.' They argue that group identity, or 'entitativity,' can be strengthened through formal meetings alongside informal interactions over lunch or in the hallway. 'Meetings serve as the primary formal occasion in which workgroup entitativity can be maintained or repaired for optimal workgroup performance.' This grant supports an ambitious research project by Blanchard and Allen to empirically assess the degree to which (and which features of) virtual meetings produce stronger group entitativity and to test a hypothesis about whether other mechanisms for informal team awareness might improve the entitativity of virtual, distributed teams. For the latter, they will test whether adoption of Gather.town, a 2-D virtual workspace where one can engage in informal video chats with remote collaborators, increases entitativity, and then quantify its impact on measures of collaboration success. Their findings promise to advance our knowledge of team science and could inform the design of new systems for virtual team collaboration.

We have entered a period of substantial change in the ways that information technologies mediate interactions among scientists. The COVID-19 pandemic represented a substantial break with in-person working, and the coming years will see continued experimentation with hybrid and virtual interactions. Despite this shift in how scientists work together, we currently lack research, tools, and best practices to support intentional decision making about how to structure such experiences.   This grant supports an effort at Northeastern University to explore new ways of fostering effective collaboration between researchers on different campuses via their “Impact Engine” mechanism for multidisciplinary research. Grant funds will allow the Northeastern University Library  to pilot two new roles:  a collaboration coordinator who will work with teams at different campuses to understand their technological requirements, and a collaboration specialist who will focus on implementation of new workspaces, data workflows, and collaboration technologies. Grant funds will also support a postdoctoral student whose sole focus will be to assess the efficacy of the various services developed.