Teaching notes: Communication

GitLab: Choudhury et al. (2020)

Start: 10 Minutes to revisit your notes / compare with your neighbour

Explain p.3 / how it works:

  • show the gitlab repository/merge requests (highlight > 100.000 merged)
  • show decision rights: merge

Main challenges (after the background, p. 5-6, focusing particularly on the challenges relevant to organizational culture)

  • p. 6 - Professional isolation (lack of informal mentoring, including serendipitous face-to-face interactions)
  • p. 12 - Building a cohesive organizational culture (selection/onboarding/socialization, mentoring)
  • p. 14 - Absence of colocation: may hinder organizational identification and the development of shared mental models (identification is important for motivation/effort, mental models: conducive organizational culture with strong norms/values)

Organizing principles

  • Reduce coordination requirements (decomposability/minimum viable change, stigmergy: coordinate through the work product and environment, see what others are doing)
  • Granting operational autonomy (not strategic autonomy)
  • Input control (“selection at the gate” - select for abilities: structuring work days, digital skills,…) -> Illustrate: control (the GitLab-CEO mentioned the differences between a consensus/hierarchical culture) - input (hiring), process (behavior: shared norms/mental models, process/documentation), output (progress reports/meetings …)
  • Detailed onboarding process
  • Open and transparent documentation to build trust (remember: trust meta-analysis)

Boundary conditions

  • Document-based/digital work (not work on physical goods)
  • Visibility of the work process and outcome (for stigmergic coordination)
  • Transparent compensation only works when contributions are easily observable
  • Risks generated by transparency must be low (e.g., privacy concerns, regulatory requirements)

TODO : maybe extend the lecture to cover coordination?

Media Synchronicity Theory

don’t start with media richness theory (maybe a bit too challenging/differences to MST are more difficult to understand) Task: too broad -> MST: communication processes at a micro-level Media synchronicity theory (Dennis, Fuller, and Valacich, 2006):

  • An influential theory in IS (citations, best paper awards)
  • The theory explains communication (and task) performance based on the fit between media synchronicity, communication processes, and appropriation factors

TODO : start with the fit aspect

Communication processes

  • Introduce the elements step-by-step:
  • Communication processes: conveyance vs. convergence, which are more specific/smaller than tasks (MRT). also distinguish transmission from processing

Media synchronicity

  • Media synchronicity: synchronous vs. asynchronous (definition)

Media synchronicity requirements

  • Media synchronicity requirements for different communication processes (table 1, proposition P1) -> importance of fit

Appropriation factors

  • Appropriation factors (fit)

Examples I

  • TODO : short exercise for the main concepts (communication processes, media synchronicity, appropriation factors, fit and communication performance)

Media characteristics

  • Media characteristics: transmission and processing capabilities: construct figure 2 step-by-step (starting with the simple sender - medium - receiver model and then adding the different elements)

Examples II

  • TODO : exercise: rate different communication media…

Summary

  • refer back to HwangKettingerYi2015 and point out that DennisFullerValacich2006 stop at the hypothesis generation step (no empirical study)
  • Derive implications
  • TODO : application / exercise (short descriptions of scenarios, such as a team rejecting a certain application)
  • TODO : collect and discuss best practices (e.g., signalling availability - are you red/orange/green?) / analyze based on MST (?) / don’t cover conflict etc. too much - they are in lecture 7

Examples/Applications

whiteboard: expands the symbol set, e.g., allowing participants to develop sketches or mathematical models. also increases parallelism (audio, video of participants, and video of whiteboard) Video: increase symbol set (visual cues, gestures, reactions) - especially when meetings aim to converge on particular items. Appropriation factors: familiar with the challenges, perhaps even trained to increase video-use, could be due to past experiences, or even norms in the team or organization. AI assistant: several features to transcribe, summarize, or sub-title meetings - improves reprocessability (during and after the meeting) coding: Convergence requires high synchronicity, especially wrt. the symbol set of collaborative coding (synchronous) - e.g., Visual Studio Live Share

https://www.zoom.com/en/products/collaboration-tools/features/

Theory of situational awareness:

What can the communication outcomes be? e.g., reduce ambiguity, rally support for a project, foster inclusion and trust, discover private information, make decisions, prevent and resolve conflicts

Individual and task/environment factors at play (stress/complexity/technology)

Key message:

  • Communication media and practices should be adapted to the situation (many facets to consider, many potential outcomes to anticipate)
  • Theories of fit may be particularly suitable, as exemplified by Media Synchronicity Theory

propositions…

Examples

  • we have a short explanation video for that
  • should we reschedule? should I brief you after the meeting?

Communication at GitLab

Have students read the communication section in the Gitlab handbook:

  • split students in x groups
  • analyze sections, summarize guidelines as well as most surprising and most useful point (briefly present to the class)
  • share short abstract with GW, GW: create a summary and share for exams

Communication settings

  • Negotiate
  • Converge
  • Convey / present
  • Learn/problem-solve (interactive vs. how-to)
  • Cocreate (pair-program)
  • Socialize
  • Coordinate in small teams or broadcast

Discussion:

  • Means of communication/best practices, policies/guidelines
  • formalizing informal communication at Gitlab: examples
  • Short educational videos/explanations
  • Timing and choice of communication media (e.g., for conflicts)
  • Symbol sets: screen sharing, virtual reality, direct collaboration on code
  • synchronous: e.g., pair programming
  • Modes of collaboration (synchronous/asynchronous)
  • Live session sharing (have students try it/visualstudio) - mention the Kude/ISR paper on pair programming?

  • netiquette - be sensitive: all going well/busy time? (green/orange/red), meeting policy (remote meeting, ….)

  • How to facilitate small-talk? Put something personal in the background. Ask for opinions/help

  • How to connect? Humor? “Employee of the month” - not taking oneself too seriously… share your shortcomings/be vulnerable

  • Balance: efficiency (answer questions once/reprocessability), conflict, misunderstandings (task/relation)