Challenges and Opportunities for Technology-Supported Activity Reporting in the Workplace
Abstract
Effective communication of activities and progress in the workplace is crucial for the success of many modern organizations. In this paper, we extend current research on workplace communication and uncover opportunities for technology to support effective work activity reporting. We report on three studies: With a survey of 68 knowledge workers followed by 14 in-depth interviews, we investigated the perceived benefits of different types of progress reports and an array of challenges at three stages: Collection, Composition, and Delivery. We show an important interplay between written and face-to-face reporting, and highlight the importance of tailoring a report to its audience. We then present results from an analysis of 722 reports composed by 361 U.S.-based knowledge workers, looking at the influence of the audience on a report's language. We conclude by discussing opportunities for future technologies to assist both employees and managers in collecting, interpreting, and reporting progress in the workplace.
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Lu et al. showed that the lack of logs of activities and tasks is often a hindrance to transferring them into time reports.
“Lu et al. recently showed that the lack of logs of activities and tasks is often a hindrance to be able to transfer them into time reports [83].”
From Detecting Developers' Task Switches and Types (2022) · cites this paper as [83]
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Detecting Developers' Task Switches and Types
Meyer, A. N., Satterfield, C., Zuger, M., Kevic, K., Murphy, G. C., Zimmermann, T., & Fritz, T. (2022) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.2020.2984086 · Cited by 14 · see citing works
“recently showed that the lack of logs of activities and tasks is often a hindrance to be able to transfer them into time reports [83].”
Background
- Authors
- Lu, D., Marlow, J., Kocielnik, R., & Avrahami, D.
- Affiliations
- University of Pittsburgh (US)
- FX Palo Alto Laboratory (US)
- University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
- ORCID
- Lu, Di
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2018-04-19
- Pages
- 1-12
- OpenAlex
- W2796286572
- Cited by
- 7
- References
- 33
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 2 · 2021: 1 · 2020: 2
- FWCI
- 1.81
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Information Systems and Management › Personal Information Management and User Behavior
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Usability and User Interface Design
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Information Systems Theories and Implementation
- Keywords
- workplace communication, progress reporting, activity reporting, knowledge workers, audience tailoring
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