Quantified Workplaces

Dear Colleagues,

The workplace is the second most significant environment in the daily lives of adults, after the home. In addition to being the primary environment for economic activity, the workplace is also a place where individuals exercise their creativity, form social relationships, and develop new skills. Traditionally, studies in computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) aimed at producing design guidelines for systems, tools and interfaces, which in turn aim to facilitate productivity and efficiency in the workplace. In the past, workplace studies have predominantly relied on ethnographic methodologies in the fields of organisational science and social science.

The proliferation of pervasive devices such as smart-phones, wearable devices, and the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to a new approach in workplace studies. Technology probes have been used to detect and analyse face-to-face interactions in the workplace using wearable RFID tags, or smartphones. Physical objects augmented with sensing capabilities have allowed the detection and analysis of work-related activities in both industrial and office-based environments. Physiological and activity related datasets captured by wearable devices have been used to assess the emotional state of employees. The availability of such technologies in the work environment has enabled a new direction in workplace studies. Sensor data captured by a range of pervasive technologies can be used to analyse human activities, and understand their impact in both productivity and performance, as well as quality of life and social behaviour. As a result of these trends, the "quantified workplace" paradigm has emerged, in which dynamics and health of organisations can be quantified through ubicomp technologies, and visualised in order to offer collective intelligence to the managerial stakeholders and act as individual triggers for self-reflection and behavioural change.

The goal of this Special Issue is to bring together a broad range of research on the quantified workplace, such as novel sensing technologies and techniques to capture workplace activities, quantitative social science applied to work environments, data-driven well-being and quality of life studies. Moreover, we seek to create a venue for discussions on the challenges that the real-world deployments of such systems face, such as those concerning legal and privacy issues, end-user and organisation engagement, and usability of the end systems.

In this Special Issue, we welcome contributions related (but not limited) to the following topics:

• Novel sensing solutions and self-reporting techniques for understanding the dynamics of a workforce both at the user level (e.g., interactions, collaborations, etc.) and the infrastructure level (e.g., spatial analysis)
• Practical challenges such as long-term sustainable engagement with such tools and methods for data collection with special considerations of privacy implications in the work environment.
• New meaningful visualisations at the individual or collective level that reflect behavioural patterns of the workplace.
• People analytics, ideas and algorithms to increase our understanding of the quantified workplace design.
• Case studies of designing, deploying and evaluating quantified workplace systems.

Manuscript Submission Information

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