Full-Time Teleworkers Sensemaking Process for Informal Communication

Sheila Gobes-Ryan University of South Florida

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are connecting coworkers and their work materials in ways that until recently required co-locating workers in organizational workplaces. Therefore, developing organizational workplaces today requires asking questions about how these possibilities are changing organizational workplace needs. One way to accomplish this is to examine work processes that are dependent of ICT’s to their work process connections.

This qualitative study examines a work process identified as essential to organizational success that has been historically documented as difficult or impossible to accomplish outside of shared physical environments – informal communication. The study documents the ways full-time teleworkers are accomplishing informal communication without being in shared work environments and for what purposes they find shared organizational workplaces important for successful informal communication.

I used a narrative case study protocol to document the context of each of the participants. Specifically, they completed two active interviews and a journal to identify and document instances of informal communication.

The group of full-time teleworkers in this study were engaging in informal communication to accomplish bonding and learning, both in ways that paralleled those communicative practices commonly accomplished in shared environments, but also in new ways that were made possible because of emergent sociomaterial practices supported by new ICT affordances. While all the study’s participants indicated that their work processes, including informal communication, could be entirely accomplished virtually, nearly all noted the importance of face-to-face communication for key aspects of bonding and learning. Additionally, the successful work practices of these teleworkers were strongly dependent on the ubiquitous adoption of ICT tools and platforms throughout these participants’ organizations, and by the distribution and mobility of increasing numbers of workers, in these organizations and others, that are using these technologies as a routine part of their daily work practices.