A case study on capturing and visualising face-to-face interactions in the workplace

Abstract

Face-to-face interactions have proven to accelerate team and larger organisation success. Many past research has explored the benefits of quantifying face-to-face interactions for informed workplace management, with little attention being paid to how this information is perceived by the employees. In this paper, we offer a reflection on the automated feedback of personal interactions in a workplace through a longitudinal study of capturing, modelling and visualisation of face-to-face interactions of 47 employees for 4 months in an industrial research lab in Europe. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 employees to understand their perception and experience with the system. Our findings suggest that the short-term feedback on personal face-to-face interactions was not perceived as an effective external cue to promote self-reflection by most, and that employees desire long-term feedback annotated with actionable attributes.