When the pandemic, which has yet to end, began in 2020, the Swedish public health authority strongly recommended employees to set up work from home. Instead of meeting colleagues and coworkers face to face at the office or in-person meetings elsewhere many employees moved such meetings to a variety of digital platforms. In addition to serving as a primary means by which organizations function, these meetings foster their growth and development. Before the pandemic a variety of office meeting places, including boardrooms, lunchrooms, cubicles, hallways and water fountains served as important contexts for organizational learning. After all, places both formal and informal where information and ideas were shared, shape organizations´ shared experiences and common understandings. Teleworking moved many activities to new contexts, including digital platforms. In this study, I examined how various employees at two departments of education perceived how shifting to digital platforms affected workplace dynamics, especially on tasks that involved communication, collaboration, experiences and feedback which are all conditions for learning and in that sense contributed to prior research on the topic. The study was informed by previous research on teams that worked remotely before the pandemic. My contribution involves participants who had little or no experience of teleworking nor had they choose that structure of working. The theoretical framework deals with theories of organizational learning, including experiential learning and team learning. The study largely confirmed a number of shortcomings that teleworking may have in terms of learning conditions, such as informal and spontaneous communication and the feeling of social presence, issues that may affect problem solving and common understandings and a risk of ideas “falling between the cracks”. However, the study shows that in some cases the habit of using a digital platform contributed to creating a greater feeling of social presence between employees, especially for those who had not worked in the “same corridor” nor in close proximity to each other. In general, the study shows that the option to meet via digital platforms creates future opportunities by allowing the precise nature of specific tasks to determine the optimal contexts for collaboration. That is, digital platforms might serve as the optimal context for some task whereas in person- meeting might be preferable for others.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-205014 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Lindström Karlkvist, Jenny |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för pedagogik och didaktik |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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