The Role of ICT in Office Work Breaks
Workplace Social Performance
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Skatova, Anya
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Bedwell, Ben
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Shipp, Victoria
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Huang, Yitong
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Young, Alexandra
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Rodden, Tom
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Bertenshaw, Emma
Proceedings of the ACM CHI'16 Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems
2016-05-07
v.1
p.3049-3060
© Copyright 2016 ACM
Summary: Break activities -- deliberate and unexpected -- are common throughout the
working day, playing an important role in the wellbeing of workers. This paper
investigates the role of increasingly pervasive ICT in creating new
opportunities for breaks at work, what impact the technology has on management
of boundaries at work, and the effects these changes have on personal
wellbeing. We present a study of the routines of office-workers, where we used
images from participants' work-days to prompt and contextualize interviews with
them. Analysis of coded photographs and interview data makes three
contributions: an account of ubiquitous ICT creating new forms of micro-breaks,
including the opportunity to employ previously wasted time; a description of
the ways in which staff increasingly bring "home to work"; and a discussion of
the emergence of "screen guilt". We evaluate our findings in relation to
previous studies, and leave three research implications and questions for
future work in this domain.
