Nokia meeting rooms

In one of the university courses we had to make several visits to various companies both primarily local ones and ones with international background. In these visits we were concentrating mostly on how cultural differences are being dealt with in those companies and in case of local companies how they are keeping the local spirit and traditions.

One of our visits was to Nokia premises in Hervanta. We have seen a presentation about the corporate culture and what is being done to increase the productivity of the company's employees. One of very important innovations that we were told about was Nokia teleconferencing solution. While developing this solution Nokia engineers were collecting the opinions of the people who have used teleconferencing a lot and were implementing their suggestions while also testing new approaches.

The design they came up with was with a set of big screens in which you could see the people you have a conference with sitting behind a desk as if they were actually sitting in front of you. The presenter explained to us that this approach helped create the feeling of the real meeting which you don't get if you're just seeing a person's head on a computer screen. After some time you would actually feel that you've known the people you're chatting with for a long time, these meetings provide far more information than the usual meeting solutions can give.

References:

http://conversations.nokia.com/2008/06/06/halo-youre-my-hero/

Traditional Face-to-Face Meetings and Electronic Meeting Systems

Nowadays, the problems of traditional face-to-face meetings have been frequently discussed in many articles. An article, which is written by Herschel, summarized the disadvantages of traditional meetings as below:

• usually 20 percent of the participants dominate 80 percent of the time
• people are often afraid to say what they think, or they feel pressured to conform with the group
• good ideas can be stifled and lost while people await their turn to speak
• ideas are often judged by who said them rather than by the value of what was said
• because people feel dissatisfied with the process, they are less likely to support the outcomes

These negative characteristics reduce the effectiveness of traditional meetings, thus the Electronic Meeting Systems become more and more popular.The Electronic Meeting System is a certain floor space, use of modern technology, that facilitates creative problem solving and decision-making of groups within or across organisations. It is widely used in many enterprises, institutions and other types of office buildings.

Sevaral articles reported that the Electronic Meeting Systems can improve the effectiveness of meetings, support information access, and change group dynamics by improving communication. Compared to traditional face-to-face meetings, the benefits of the Electronic Meeting Systems include increased participation, automatic recording, and less personal prejudice.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_meeting_system#Web_applications
http://www.tonarticles.com/how-to-integrate-intelligent-electronic-meeting-system-construction-project-electronic-meeting-system-intelligent-project-smart-home-industry.html

Problems in team work

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

- Anonymous (1)

Throughout life one belongs to many groups or teams for example in school or work. Team is more than just bunch of people working together. Team consists of different people, all with different personalities. This often causes problems, which is what I'm writing in this entry (and not because I would feel that our group needs this :)).

Problems are often caused by only one person, as Bennett Gordon writes in his article: "Felps identified three personality types that can ruin a group: jerks, slackers, and depressive pessimists." (2) Gordon says that one person who fits any of those personality types can make a group perform 30-40% worse. Problem often spreads through the group. For example, in the study Gordon writes about, groups with jerks in them started being mean to each other and groups with depressive pessimists often acted more depressed (2).

Nate Desmond writes in his blog entry (1) about four big problems in team work and how to solve them. These are:

1. Self-centeredness
This means caring more for yourself than for others. This damages the interest of everyone in a team. Team should work towards a common interest, but selfishness causes that individual tries to accomplish what they think is best for themselves only. Solution to this is easier said than done: selflessness. Every member must put their own interests aside and work towards the goals of the team.

2. Half-heartedness
Person exhibiting this thinks that the group is not accomplishing anything and/or would rather be somewhere else. The lack of interests worsens the effectiveness of the team and spreads fast. Solution to this is dedication. Members should all be passionate about the goal and actually want to work towards it. Better motivation may be needed.

3. Uncooperative
Too much competition within a team will destroy its ability to work as an unit. Team members may be competing maybe for a promotion or grades and try to make themselves look better than their teammates. This spreads rapidly and the team will not accomplish nearly as much as it would in a trusting environment. Solution is collaboration. Team members should work together, not separately. This increases team's effectiveness and the team is prepared to compete with other teams as a whole.

4. Stubborness
Refusal to think of new ideas and methods is a huge problem. Team members who refuse to consider something new will destroy the cohesiveness of a team. Solution to this is flexibility. Everyone should give space for other ideas than their own. This does not mean that one should surrender long-held ideas and opinions. However good team players are willing to learn.

Group leaders and managers hold a big role in overcoming problems in a team. The best thing would be to prevent them happening in the first place. In order to accomplish this as much as possible, training is important (3). Understanding how teams evolve and work helps the team to succeed.

However, neither team managers or members can properly anticipate all problems that could occur. When problem comes up, team that faces it head-on, solve it and learn from it have the biggest chances to avoid the same in the future and succeed. Managers should make sure that no problem goes unnoticed. In Gordon's article he says: "There was just one guy who was a particularly good leader. And what he would do was he would ask questions and he would engage all the team members and diffuse conflicts." Recognizing the problem is the first step to the solution and when a good leader sees that the team is failing to cooperate, they call up a meeting and discuss the problem.

Being a team manager is hard and responsible work. I'm currently in software project management course and our team has already faced many problems. In my experience in student projects it's common that lack of motivation is a problem, as no one's actually getting paid for the work, other than ECTS ;). Often people just want to complete the course but don't really mind about the grade.

Let us all keep doing the good work in our team :)

References:

(1) http://www.practicalmanliness.com/5-problems-that-destroy-teamwork-and-how-to-solve-them/
(2) http://www.utne.com/Science-Technology/The-Problem-with-Teamwork-How-to-Lose-Friends-and-Negatively-Influence-People.aspx
(3) http://www.articlesbase.com/team-building-articles/the-keys-to-dealing-with-teamwork-problems-1739998.html

Meetme Meeting Feature of Doodle

Doodle is one of the easiest tool to setup meetings and events online and is absolutely un-intrusive. Doodle is a wonderful web app for scheduling. Users can create an event, add a list of potential dates and times, and send it around to other participants to vote on a final time slot for the event.

However, now you can also have a one-to-one meeting using doodle with it's new service called as MeetMe.
With multiple single signon support like Gmail, OpenID, Facebook and Yahoo, it's one click step to setting up one-to-one meeting.

MeetMe

Doodle

Miscommunication in CMC

There are numerous issues that can go wrong in the human communication and CMC introduced more of those. In CMC people are usually distanced from their opponents by the computer screens and limited to text as the only communication method. Of course there are systems that make video conferencing possible but most of the CMC is still happening in the text-only systems.

So, what are the main problems we have in CMC: there are people flaming, trolling, lurking and even those who use fake identities to deceive people. When you are not face-to-face with another person you cannot know for sure if the person is actually telling you the truth or is it who you think it is.

I will not fill this blog entry with copypasta, you can look all the terms definition on the appropriate wiki or dramatica web pages. I would like to mention though, that modern CMC may also be very ambiguous if you don't know at least the most popular memes, especially if you are on the Anonymous-occupied board like 4chan.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sockpuppet_(Internet)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaming_(internet)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lurking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(Internet)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Copypasta

PS:

A nice reading piece on miscommunication:

http://www.neurovr.org/emerging/book3/3CHAPT_09.PDF

Monitors and Camera Zooms Affect Dominance in Video-Mediated Communication

Last week, we mentioned about the Video-Mediated Communication. The Video-Mediated Communication become more and more popular as a way of supporting informail remote interaction. Compared to Face-to-Face interaction, it makes the connection among remote offices and cities, and can make people working together as if they were in the same place. However, monitors and camera zooms can affect domiannce in Video-Mediated Communication.

“Camera Angle Affects Dominance in Video-Mediated Communication”, an article written by Wei Huang, Judith S. Olson, and Gary M. Olson, introduces a very interesting experiment. In this experiment, the researchers designed an interact through a Video-Mediated Communication while engaged in a group decision-making task. The researchers set the monitor and camera angle high in one room and low in another to simulate a situation where a “tall” person is talking to a “short” person.

To prevent the effects of age, gender and other factors, the participants were all white American men. The participants were told to work a problem seperately, and then negotiated a final solution with another by the Video-Mediated Communication. After that, they filled out a post-test scale in order to evaluate their perceived influence on the final decision.

From this experiment, the researchers made a conlusion that “tall” person are significantly more influential than “short” person. This conlusion has geart significant: The monitor placement and the camera zoom setting can affect the person's dominance in a Video-Mediated Communication. Similarly, there are a lot of other factors can affect the person's dominance, and these are under studying.

Reference:
http://www.crew.umich.edu/publications/02-09.pdf

Importance of common ground in communication

Common ground and grounding was an important topic in the lecture so I thought I'd write something about it in this weeks post.

It was said in the lecture that common ground in communication means that people share meaning and are talking about the same thing so conversation constantly negotiates meaning. According to Herbert H. Clark and Susan E. Brennan common ground refers to the "mutual knowledge, mutual beliefs, and mutual assumptions that is essential for communication between two people”.

If people are talking face to face, it is easy for them to find common ground for their messages and get understood well. However, when thinking of other ways of communication like telephone or different chat systems, it is usually more difficult to find that grounding. This fact poses additional challenges for groupware systems so that misunderstandings due to the lack of common ground can be avoided.

The question of how we use language and the theory of human-human communication is discussed in Andrew Monk's text ”Common Ground in Electronically Mediated Conversation”. This is an intersting text to read and helps to understand the issues that electronically mediated communication might have.

References:

Clark, Herbert H.; Brennan, Susan E. (1991), "Grounding in communication"

Monk, Andrew (2009), ”Common Ground in Electronically Mediated Conversation”