Towards Inclusive Futures for Worker Wellbeing

DOI

The global COVID-19 pandemic has motivated new collaborations across borders and boundaries, while also emphasizing the importance of supporting the continued wellbeing of hybrid, remote, and in-person workers. Work in CSCW and HCI has demonstrated that identity, culture, and organizational factors all have a strong influence on how people come to understand wellbeing. However, more work is needed to understand how to support workplace wellbeing for location-independent teams, particularly given the importance of these diverse factors. In this study, we ask the question: how did organizational, cultural, and individual factors influence how workers understood their workplace wellbeing needs during the move to remote work? We take a look at the broader human infrastructure supporting hybrid and remote work, including both workers who engage in technology-mediated labor, and the essential workers who support it. Through linguistic analyses of 13,265 diary entries collected throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and in-depth interviews with 26 employees from around the world, we find substantial diversity in wellbeing needs and conceptualizations. We build on these findings to provide recommendations for how technology design can better support new and diverse forms of worker wellbeing.