FW-HTF-P: Rapid Organizational Assimilation in On-demand Work through Social Learning

The Internet and related technologies have transformed the way of work, by allowing people to work remotely, and increasingly, on short-term projects or gigs. Online platforms make it easier for workers to find short-term work and for employers to hire freelancers for their short-term needs. Such short-term work arrangements offer workers the independence and flexibility they desire, while at the same time allowing companies to momentarily tap into external knowledge and experiences their workforce lacks.

However, short-term workers today exist on the fringes of their temporary workplaces and find it challenging to build social connections within the organizations that hire them, affecting both their well-being and productivity negatively. Workers from minority or marginalized groups are particularly impacted negatively. This project will develop a research program that accelerates assimilation into future work settings through a unique partnership with two industry collaborators, who operate at very different scales and rely on freelancers to varying degrees: one partner is a small business with fewer than a hundred permanent employees, the other partner is a large, multinational information-technology and research company that operates in many countries.

In coordination with these partners, the researchers will organize a series of workshops to create a focused research agenda that is beneficial for workers and organizations broadly. Based on this agenda, the project team will include diverse stakeholders, such as industry representatives, workers, and researchers, who can then make progress on this research agenda.

This planned research will also train graduate students across multiple disciplines, including computer science, social sciences, and organizational science. Given the central emphasis on inclusion and access, the project will place particular emphasis on recruiting women, students of color, and first-generation students to contribute to this research.

This project brings together several disciplines, including learning science, computer science, and social psychology. The intellectual contribution of this proposal is to establish the requirements and key technological affordances of a work environment for rapid assimilation through social learning. This is done by focusing on the design of socialization tools for remote gig workers.

The research is highly integrative and converges expertise from social/behavioral sciences and computer/learning science. The team is structured to achieve multiple convergent goals: To address the need for rapid assimilation of on-demand workers into organizations, this research will uncover the social and technical needs for digital and physical environments that accelerate newcomer situated learning and assimilation.

Second, it will build a diverse and cross-disciplinary team to build such environments in planned future research. Finally, this project will positively impact a highly skilled, and economically significant workforce of information workers at large, and the project's research agenda is likely to particularly help female and underrepresented workers be more included in the workforce.

This agenda will outline key research questions, quantitative and qualitative study methodologies, and evaluation metrics for designing environments (both digital and physical) that enhance work practices in assimilation and socialization, with an emphasis on access, inclusion, and equity.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.