How Collaboration Tools Facilitate Visibility Among Remote Knowledge Workers

Challenge
Collaboration tools play an increasingly significant role in mediating communication and visibility (both in terms of being physically seen and seen worthy) between actors. Mainly among information workers whose jobs are creating, manipulating, or analysing information. Meetings and working synchronously with colleagues mostly happened through video conference software. Research shows that many employees try to justify the increased autonomy provided by remote work by increasing their visibility to prove their worthiness for the organisation. Quite frankly, in term of visibility as being physically seen, empirical evidence said that not all people are comfortable turning their camera on during a meeting. Therefore, this research questioned how collaboration tools help workers to increase visibility when working remotely.

Aim
This study aims to understand how remote knowledge workers use collaboration tools to assert their visibility to reduce the need for face-to-face interaction.

Approach
This study will employ case studies of virtual collaboration settings between knowledge workers across different positions within selected companies.

Contribution
With the increasing amount of remote work practices, the output of this study hopes to help organisations consider the right mix between remote work and in-office work in implementing the hybrid work, especially by looking at how collaboration tools allow new ways of working.