Interview results comm 122

What is your name?

● Jonathan

What is the name of the organization that you work for?

● Gimfix

What title/position do you hold at the aforementioned organization?

● Website Development Specialist

What roles/responsibilities are you expected to uphold at your respective organization?

● Designing, building, and maintaining clients' websites ● Front-end and back-end development ● Ensuring websites are responsive ● Optimizing site performance ● Collaborating with designers for user-friendly interfaces

What qualifications (Undergrad/Postgrad if any)/ Pre-requisites did you require in order to successfully acquire this position?

● Bachelor's degree in Computer Science ● Certifications in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and CMS

Do you have any previous experience relating to what you currently do at your organization?

● Several years as a freelance web developer ● Experience building websites for small businesses and startups

Effect of Remote Work in Your Workplace

How much of the work is remote / How many of your employees are working remotely?

● 100% remote work ● All employees work remotely

How do you determine which positions in your organization should or should not be a remote position?

● All positions are suitable for remote work ● Focus on roles that can be managed and executed digitally

How do you manage workplace conflict/misunderstandings in the context that one party involved is working remotely, and one is in person?

● Use video calls, chat platforms, and collaborative tools ● Address misunderstandings through prompt discussions and meetings

What do you believe to be the advantages and disadvantages of remote work?

● Advantages: Increased flexibility (deadline not follow a prompt), improved work-life balance (especially with kids), global talent pool

● Disadvantages: Isolation, team cohesion challenges, work-life separation difficulties

What technologies have you found most helpful for remote communication, and is it difficult to communicate with remote employees?

● Slack for messaging ● Zoom for video conferencing ● Trello for project management ● Communication is generally seamless but can have time zone and interaction challenges

How long has it been since your company has decided to adopt remote working?

● Operating remotely for the entire time

How long did it take for your company to transition into partial remote work, and was the transition easy to accept for yourself and your colleagues?

● No transition period as the company was remote from the start ● Remote work was integral to work culture from day one

How do you feel that working remotely has affected your work-life balance?

● Greatly improved work-life balance ● Reduced stress and increased job satisfaction

Do your fellow employees agree or disagree with the following statement: Remote work is beneficial for our organization?

● Consensus: Remote work is highly beneficial ● Allows flexibility, attracts top talent, creates an inclusive environment

How did training differentiate between remote and in-person employees?

● All training programs designed for remote execution ● Online modules, virtual workshops, and mentorship programs

Interview Plan (Pt. 2)

Self-Introduction: (Interviews will be held individually).

I AM A STUDENT CURRENTLY ENROLLED IN A COMMUNICATIONS COURSE titled Organizational Communication. Our purpose here today is to gain an in-depth perspective from work professionals relating to a specific topic that our group has selected to write about, specifically Flexible and Virtual Collaboration.

Regarding confidentiality, none of your answers, nor your name will be discussed nor distributed outside of our classroom, anything that may or may not have been recorded or noted will be deleted by the end of the Summer 2024 Session A quarter.

The main reason for this interview is to discuss the part that remote work plays within your field of work. We ask you to speak freely whilst holding nothing back whether your thoughts be negative or positive so that we may gain as honest a perspective about this subject as possible, as this will all be held in confidentiality.

Background Information:

Now that we’ve introduced ourselves and our purpose for being here today, we’d like to get some information regarding yourself and your place of work.

● What is your Name?

○ Brian Dincau

● What is the name for the organization that you work for?

○ CNSI CAL NANO-SYSTEMS INSTITUTE WITHIN UCSB

● What title/position do you hold at the aforementioned organization?

○ FORMAL TITLE: SPECIALIST, WORKING TITLE: Microfluidics Lab AND INNOVATION WORKSHOP MANAGER

● What roles/responsibilities are you expected to uphold at your respective organization?

○ MANAGE TWO DIFFERENT SHARED FACILITIES THAT ARE THE Microfluidics Lab and Innovation Workshop, WITHIN BOTH OF THESE HE HAS A WHOLE BUNCH OF high-tech TOOLS USED FOR fabricating parts for RESEARCH AND I AM RESPONSIBLE FOR MAINTAINING these TOOLS AND TRAINING PEOPLE from all over campus HOW TO USE THESE TOOLS IN ADDITION TO FIGURING OUT LOGISTICS REQUIRED FOR BILLING THESE PEOPLE, Since these are recharge facilities (people pay small amount to use our equipment which is much more affordable than buying a laser

cutter for their own lab, they’d rather learn to use mine, cut their parts and take those parts back to their lab). I am THE ONLY MANAGER FOR THESE FACILITIES AND DO ALMOST EVERYTHING INVOLVED IN RUNNING THEM), additionally he has a rotating crew of undergrad staff ‘workshop wizards’, responsible in hiring and managing all of these staff, in charge of maintenance

● What qualifications (Undergrad/Postgrad if any)/ Prerequisites did you require in order to successfully acquire this position?

○ BA/MASTERS/PHD (NOT REQUIRED, PREFERRED, ALLOWED A HIGHER BEGINNING PAYSCALE, HAVING JOB EXP IN INDUSTRY WAS AN ESSENTIAL PART, WORKED FOR SEMICONDUCTOR FOUNDRY, IN SALES FOR KITCHEN HVAC, SKILLS)

Thank you for providing that information.

Effect of Remote Work in your workplace

Now that we’ve gotten some background information about you, we’d like to ask you some questions relating to how remote work plays a role in your organization.

● How much of the work is remote / How many of your employees are working remotely?

○ Directly under me (undergrad), not a lot of work possible to do remote, some maintain lab wiki (update/improve wiki), some staff assigned to do remote work, about 10% of work logged as remote, MANY coworkers are remotely working however, financial team and HR at CSNI frequently work remote, most work done at pc and as thus not required to be working in person. TLDR, lot of admin is gone working remote

● How do you determine which positions in your organization should or should not be a remote position?

○ Refer to previous question

● How do you manage workplace conflict/misunderstandings in the context that one party involved is working remote, and one is in-person.

○ Not in their experience, CSNI is very good at communicating and has a very small team which makes it easy to communicate, all contribute to a google calendar in order to properly align schedules

● What do you believe to be the advantages and disadvantages of remote work to be?

○ Was working during covid remotely, notices that advantages include comfort (being able to prepare favorite beverages/environment/comfortable clothing/pet presence), being able to tune in in the comfort of home helped with engagement to some degree, less to worry about and be self conscious of anything, just focus on the class material and content. Recordings were a large advantage, allows flexibility in students’ schedules. Disadvantages include comfort, in terms of if home is not under your control (housemates, family that is loud and disruptive, can make it difficult to focus on remote work), mentions visiting parents and trying to remote work can be difficult because they try to strike up convo constantly, reviewing drawings for a part of discussing a new tool are things that are very difficult to translate and communicate remote, technical language

● What technologies have you found most helpful for remote communication, and is it difficult to communicate with remote employees?

○ Slack, understanding limitations of remote work so don’t ask for in-person help, being able to screenshare and draw is very useful (can do it in zoom, in other social apps such as discord, being able to screen record is also very useful, whether its through tool or OBS, you can go back and re-listen to a meeting to ensure you don’t miss anything)

● How long has it been since your company has decided to adopt remote working?

○ Pre-covid it was not common at all, but after lockdown it sort of became CNSI soft-policy to have one remote work day per week , don’t really have the chance to use this as he is facilities manager and requires a lot of in-person work, other people do ake vantage though

● How long did it take for your company to transition into partial-remote work, and was the transition easy to accept for yourself and colleagues?

○ I’m not sure, started a CSNI in 2022, so by the time I joined the soft policy was already incorporated.

● (In the case that interviewee participates in remote work) How do you feel that working remotely has affected your work-life balance?

○ NA

● Do your fellow employees agree or disagree with the following statement: Remote work is beneficial for our organization.

○ Most would agree – the opportunity to work remotely is beneficial because it generally allows people to have a better work-life balance, because I am single and have no children but employees that do have family, spouse, children, family members it is critical to be able to have this option because maybe they don’ have anyone to watch their child, or needs to go to the doctor, they would be able to take those responsibilities themselves while keeping up wih work remotely (rather

than going to and from home and work), allows employees to manage their time efficiently, again, there is a HIGH LEVEL OF TRUST INVOLVED, can see in much larger companies members of a bigger team would be able to take advantage and slack when there’s so many people, at CSNI everyone has an important role and holds up their responsibilities neatly.

● How did training differentiate between remote and in-person employees?

○ All training that I;ve specifically gave is in-person, because it involves using hardware and tools, basically prefers muscle memory of everything, all my raining is hands-on using the tool during training. When people start using my lab for the first time, all of them have to take a course called fundamental of lab safety, which is done remotely, so all of my training incorporates both in-person and remote factors, if I didn’t have this program it would take up hours of my time and schedule re-teaching the same lab safety program to all the people who end up trying top train for our tools, remote makes it easier.

Thank you for your responses. Wrap-Up Before we end things off today, we have a few closing questions we’d like to inquire about;

● Is there anything that I haven’t already asked that you’d like to mention regarding remote work?

○ No, I don’t think so.

● Would you like for your real name to be used in our interview results, or would you rather use a fake name and if so, what would you like that to be?

○ Fine with using my real name. Thank you so much for your time and answers, your responses have provided critical insight for our group in regards to learning how remote work has affected the professional field.

d202f71586ece25fd07aa7cd039f1102 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.

All right, hello, so my name is Frank and I'm representative from a group within the class at University of California, Santa Barbara, entitled Organization Communication. Our purpose here today is to gain an in-depth perspective from work professionals relating to a specific topic that our group has selected to write about specifically flexible and virtual collaboration. Regarding confidentiality, none of your answers, nor your name, will be discussed nor described outside of our classroom.

Anything that may or may not have been recorded or noted will be deleted by the end of the seminar 2024, session eight quarter. The main reason for this interview is to discuss the part that remote workplace within your file of work. We ask you to speak freely with holding nothing back, whether your thoughts be negative or positive so that we may gain as honest perspective about this subject as possible, as this will all be held in confidentially.

Now that we've entrusted ourselves and our purpose for being here today, we'd like to get some information regarding yourself and your place of work. So what's your name first? Hi, my name is Brandon Po and I am a senior software developer at Microsoft. Okay, so what's the role are you expected to uphold at your respective organization? So my job is to write software as the primary responsibility, support our service as it runs in production, and as a senior I'm expected to collaborate and help coach and train other employees.

Okay, so what qualifications did you require in order to successfully acquire this position? So mine's a little different. Most people enter this field with a bachelor or master's degree in computer science. They can start out as a software engineer one out of university with a four-year degree.

I don't have a degree, so I was able to get the job with experience. I had experience in the field already that kind of made up for my lack of education. Um, so do you have any previous experience relating to what you currently do at your organization? Can you repeat that? Yeah, do you have any previous experience relating to what you currently do at your organization? Currently, no.

So I had originally started at my organization in IT, and I had previous experience in IT before I joined the organization, which was in 2005. Since then, my software development experience I have through my work. Okay, so thank you for providing that information, and now that we've gotten some background information about you, we'd like to ask you some questions relating to how remote work plays a role in your organization.

So how much of the work is remote, and how many of your employees are working remotely? For my particular team, I would say at any given time, um, probably 50% of the team is working remote at least. When I say my team, it's about 25 people. Um, everybody works remote at some point during the week.

They're kind of snapped to a particular schedule where everybody comes into the office, almost everybody comes into the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and then many people are remote other than that. On top of that, we also have co-workers that are in different locations. So we have quite a few people in Atlanta, Georgia, and we also have one who works out of India, and then a couple people who are just 100% remote, and they're not based out of their own particular office.

Okay, so how do you determine which positions in your organization should or should not be a remote position? So a lot of it, at least for our team, comes down to the preference of the employee that's getting hired. All right, software engineering is a very competitive industry. Finding good software engineers is hard.

So when we find a good software engineer, we typically will accommodate them and either have them work remote, or they will also have the option of going to probably, like, I think most of our on-prem hire is going into our Atlanta office these days. So they basically have the choice of saying, yes, I want to go to Atlanta, or I'm going to be remote. Now, some of that is actually coming back to Redmond.

Some of our positions are opening up in Redmond as well. So they kind of have a choice of all of those things. Okay, thank you.

And how do you manage workplace conflict in the context that one party involved in working remotely and one is in person? I mean, we've been doing this for a while, the remote work, even before COVID. People would work from home for a day or two a week a lot of times, or work later in the evening, come to work, and then we need to go pick up their kids from school, and then go home and work some more. So remote work has been in our organization for a while.

Those were a little rare, but everybody worked from home. We always had the capability of working from home, at least some part, some fashion. Since then, you know, when COVID happened, everybody was remote.

So it was, you know, a steep learning curve for a lot of people. And now these days, we're just flexible. So we're kind of used to it.

Again, especially with the Redmond office. It's just normal at this point to have these conversations. The toughest part is the time zone differences for a lot of things.

Atlanta and Redmond have a three hour time zone difference. India has a much, much, much larger time zone difference. So those are the hardest things, especially for people

who have kids out here in Redmond, where they might go in a little later because they got to get the kids to school and everything.

That's a big difference between when somebody might have started in Atlanta working that day, versus when you get into the office. So the number of hours that are available to collaborate with some people is much smaller than if you all worked in the same office. We're all physically in the same place.

I got eight hours to talk to somebody. But for a lot of cases, if we're working with people on the East Coast, that might be only three or four hours. Oh, wow.

All right. What do you believe to be the advantages and disadvantages for remote work? Some of the advantages is you get to be flexible, right? I can do a little work, take care of some personal things, and then get back to work right away. I can work later.

I can start work earlier. So those are some of the advantages for me personally. Disadvantages are mostly around just collaboration, especially around the time zones, like I mentioned.

The other ones are just around, if I'm in the office with people and I have a question, I can turn around and I can see, oh, that person would know the answer to this. And I can just turn around and say, hey, so-and-so, I've got this problem. What do you think? And they can just answer it.

Otherwise, if that person is a remote person, I've got to look to see, are they online on another call, right? Because in order to do anything, you've got to get into a call with somebody. Or you type them a message, and hopefully what your question is can be typed in one or two sentences. You can do it that way.

But if it's more complicated than that, then you've got to get on a call with them. And there's other people that are doing that too. So it's a lot harder to get your spot in line, you know? Yeah, true.

And spend more time on that. And so what technologies have you found most helpful for remote communication? And is it difficult to communicate with remote employees? So, I mean, being a Microsoft, the technology that we use is Microsoft Teams, right? Okay. We developed that, and we have unlimited access to it.

And it is one of the two most commonly used, commonly recommended software for remote work. So those tools are pretty good. We have a lot of options there for what we call either synchronous communication, where the other person is actively responding to you, and you're expecting kind of a real time thing.

Or what we call async communication, which is, I don't need immediate answer. Let me just post a question, and somebody will get to it when they get to it. So we have the

capability of doing that as well as just face-to-face video calls.

So, you know, the tools are great. What was the second half of the question? The second one is, is it difficult to communicate with remote employees? I mean, again, the difficulty is around scheduling and getting a hold of them, basically, right? You know, again, especially time zones, and then adding distance on top of that. Like, you know, we have great technology, but when we're collaborating with people in India, you know, there's actually a delay in your conversation, right? You say something, it's another 10 minutes, it's another second before they hear it, and then when they repeat, it's another second before it comes back.

So when you have multiple people on the call, and somebody's trying to answer your question, you can have people talking over each other, just because they didn't realize when they started talking, somebody else had already started talking. So there's that kind of thing, too, as well as people, you know, some people may not have a good connection, so they'll drop in and out, they may not hear what you said, they may, you know, disappear in the middle of their call, because they lost connection to the meeting. So, you know, those are problems you don't have in face-to-face.

So it's just something you've got to adjust to. So how long has it been since your company has decided to adopt remote working? Like I mentioned before, like, we've always had some bit of remote work. Even before COVID, yeah.

Yep. You know, even prior to COVID, we've had some, we've had remote work capabilities, we've had a few people here and there that were actually fully remote and weren't based out of an office. But those were kind of the exceptions, right? Most people were in the office and worked out of the office and worked face-to-face.

But once COVID hit, we were fully remote. And the nice thing was, is because we had the capabilities before and people have used it before, it wasn't that hard of a transition. Obviously, there was a transition, but it wasn't that difficult since we were already familiar with the tools.

Yeah. Okay. And how long did it take for your company to transition into part-time remote work? And was the transition easy to accept for yourself and your colleagues? Yeah, I mean, it was almost overnight that we had to.

Now, obviously, it took some time to adapt, but I would say it didn't t