Normal and Easy: Account Sharing Practices in the Workplace

Work is being digitized across all sectors, and digital account sharing has become common in the workplace. In this paper, we conduct a qualitative and quantitative study of digital account sharing practices in the workplace. Across two surveys, we examine the sharing process at work, probing what accounts people share, how and why they share those accounts, and identifying the major challenges people face in sharing accounts. Our results demonstrate that account sharing in the modern workplace serves as a norm rather than a simple workaround; centralizing collaborative activity and reducing boundary management effort are key motivations for sharing. But people still struggle with a lack of activity accountability and awareness, conflicts over simultaneous access, difficulties controlling access, and collaborative password use. Our work provides insights into the current difficulties people face in workplace collaboration with online account sharing, as a result of inappropriate designs that still assume a single-user model for accounts. We highlight opportunities for CSCW and HCI researchers and designers to better support sharing by multiple people in a more usable and secure way.