Home-Life and Work Rhythm Diversity in Distributed Teamwork: A Study with Information Workers during the COVID-19 Pandemic

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of previously collocated information workers had to work from home, a trend expected to become much more commonplace in the future. We interviewed 53 information workers from 17 U.S. teams to understand how this unique extended work-from-home setting influenced teamwork and how they adapted to it. Using a grounded theory approach, we discovered that extended remote work highlighted diversity in team members’ home-lives and daily work rhythms. Whereas these types of diversity played only marginal roles for teams in the collocated office, they had a more tangible impact in the work-from-home setting, from coordination delays and interruptions to conflicts related to workload fairness, miscommunication, and trust. Importantly, workers reported that their teams adapted to these challenges by setting explicit norms and standards for online communication and asynchronous collaboration and by promoting general social and situational awareness. We discuss computer-supported designs to help teams manage these latent diversities in an extended remote teamwork setting.