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PACMHCI Volume 2, Issue CSCW, Article 96, November 2018
Complimenting Invisible Work: Identifying Hidden Employee Contributions through a Voluntary, Positive, and Open Work Review System
YONG MING KOW, School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong WAIKUEN CHENG, Independent Researcher
Invisible work is an important CSCW research agenda, and also integral to operations within companies. To reveal these hidden practices, studies to date have suggested that companies use IT systems to share location, task progress, and enquiry information among employees, or to conduct research work which identifies informal practices. In this paper, we examine a work review system, in the form of a smartphone app feature, to identify hidden employees’ contributions. This Complimenting Feature, developed in April 2017 by an air cargo handling company in Hong Kong, allows its terminal staff to compliment other employees—anyone they like, and anytime they like. In December 2017, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 19 terminal staff regarding their experiences using the app. Our analysis of the interviews found a wide range of invisible work being identified despite the existence of a similar paper review form. We have also found evidence of increased employees’ motivation and social learning.
CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Collaborative and social computing; Empirical
studies in collaborative and social computing
KEYWORDS
Invisible work, work review, information system, semi-structured interviews.
ACM Reference format:
Yong Ming Kow and Waikuen Cheng. 2018. Complimenting Invisible Work: Identifying Hidden
Employee Contributions through a Voluntary, Positive, and Open Work Review System. Proceedings of
the ACM on Human Computer Interaction (HCI), CSCW, 2, Article 96 (November 2018), 24 pages.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3274365
1 INTRODUCTION
In every organization, work rarely gets done efficiently if every worker only follows
documented procedures. Beyond documented and visible work processes, there exists
invisible work which is developed out of workers’ day-to-day experiences, easily evades
documentation, and is commonly communicated between co-workers privately; while
invisible, it is essential to accomplishing work [27,37]. For example, a company that only
measures its telephone operators by the number of calls they could handle every day may
Author’s addresses: Yong Ming Kow, 18 Tat Hong Ave, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong SAR; Waikuen Cheng, Hong Kong.
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https://doi.org/10.1145/3274365
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eventually decide to outsource this operation to a cheaper country; but its management may
not know that its local operators had local linguistic knowledge and communication skills
which kept their customers happy [27]. To outsource this operation may eventually reduce
its customers’ satisfaction, resulting in long-term profit loss to the company.
Companies that are aware of their invisible work can avoid accidentally eliminating
important roles during reorganization exercises [9,34,40], or even directly support or reward
employees for their hidden contributions [37,41]. The first step is to identify where such
hidden work practices exist in the company [41]. Since invisible work is often communicated
at a personal level, one promising way to identify such practices is for workers to report the
work themselves [36,37]. While previous studies have commonly suggested conducting
research studies such as ethnography, big data analysis, and social network analysis to
identify invisible work [6,10,46], recent studies with an online community and a corporate
program suggest that a work review system may also be used for such a purpose [17,36]. Thus
we ask the research question: How will employees utilize and experience a corporate work
review system that is designed to identify and support invisible work?
In this study, we examined a Complimenting Feature within an app developed by an air cargo
handling company in Hong Kong, Express (pseudonym). The company has requested that we
anonymize its name. From April 2017, Express introduced to its employees this feature in an
app, allowing its terminal staff to compliment other employees—anyone they like, anytime
they like, and within broad categories approved by the management; namely safety,
cleanliness, team spirit, and mutual respect. This Complimenting Feature was formally
conceived to digitize and complement a formal paper form known as the Feedback Form (FF
Form), commonly filled out by Express supervisors to compliment their subordinates. In
December 2017, we interviewed 19 Express air cargo terminal staff (predominantly ground
and terminal frontline workers and supervisors) regarding their experiences using the app.
These interviews were conducted over two days at Express. Each interview lasted between
20 and 30 minutes. We asked questions including “What are your day-to-day
responsibilities?” “How had you used the Complimenting Feature?” “How had the feature
affected you and your colleagues?” and “How were the compliments different in the app
compared to those in the FF Form?” The interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed in
Cantonese (native Chinese language of Hong Kong) and English, and analyzed for recurring
themes. The employees’ feedback regarding the Complimenting Feature was mostly positive.
We found that the Complimenting Feature could identify forms of invisible work beyond those
reported in the formal paper form. Finally, we discuss benefits and reasons for the
Complimenting Feature’s design success.
2 INVISIBLE WORK WITHIN COMPANIES
Most forms of labor have parts of their work that are invisible to someone [37]. The work of
volunteers of an online community can be invisible to visitors of its websites [5,17,42]. The
work of employees within a company can be invisible to its customers. In this study, we
address a form of invisible work performed by corporate employees but hidden from
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management and other employees. An often cited example is that of nurses whose work
alongside doctors is often overlooked by medical institutions [23,38].
One of the main reasons for the existence of invisible work in companies is in the necessary
use of quantified productivity indicators to improve organizational efficiency [37]. One
purpose of an institution is to socially organize employees so as to efficiently produce
products and services [8]. To serve this end, managers use productivity indicators to limit
workers’ tasks only to those that serve the company’s productivity goals. Star and Strauss
[37] call this “abstracting and indicators manipulation,” and we can call it indicators
manipulation for short. But such indicators are not perfect, and productive work which does
not have unquestionably obvious effects on the indicators often gets ignored and become
invisible. For example, a localized communicative style which telephone operators use to
strike a rapport with customers may be ignored by indicators like “average call duration” [25].
One may question whether management could provide a better set of indicators which more
accurately represent its interests. But even when managers are aware of a work practice, they
may still perceive it as routine or trivial, and thus ignore it [37]. Star and Strauss [37] call this
“background” work. A common case for nurses is that hospitals sometimes do not bother to
train nurses to console patients and make them feel comfortable about their treatment, but
nurses still try their best to develop informal practices of improving patients’ wellbeing at the
hospital [23]. The nurses’ informal practices of caring for patients’ wellbeing may be seen as
what Hochschild [14] calls emotional labor. While such work is important to service
companies, it is also generally underappreciated by management. In another example from a
study of corporate knowledge management repositories, Kayhan and Bhattacherjee [19]
found that in-house experts appointed by the management had tended to ignore
contributions which did not conform to institutional standards, even when they were
practical to employees. Here, formal practices refer to tasks and objectives that management
members discuss in official meetings and record in documents; these practices are generally
standardized into procedures and reflected in productivity measures; whereas informal
practices refer to objectives and practices employees have discovered to be effective through
their day-to-day work experiences, but privately share among co-workers only [37].
There are also times when employees simply do not want the work to be made known to the
managers. Star and Strauss [37] call this “backstage” work. For example, Hutchins [16]
reported that official procedures within the US Navy were presented, in formal records, as a
serially ordered set of tasks; but in practice, many of the tasks were improvised by the sailors,
and performed in no strict ordering and under tight communication and coordination. The
serially ordered tasks are only “rationalized versions [that] are easier to think about,
understand, and promulgate… but it would be both difficult and inefficient to do the job the
way it is described in the written procedures” [16] (p. 290). Thus, backstage work exists to
make reports appear orderly and easy to comprehend during management meetings, which
otherwise a complete disclosure would make frontline work difficult to explain or even open
to scrutiny.
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Thus, between visibility and invisibility of work is an “interplay between the formal and the
informal” practices [37] (p. 10). In their day-to-day experiences, co-workers share invisible
practices, and such sharing helps foster trust, personal relationship [5], and tacit
understanding of what makes them feel that their work is unique and meaningful [21,28].
3 IDENTIFYING INVISIBLE WORK THROUGH WORK REVIEW SYSTEMS
Lucy Suchman [41] argues that companies should represent invisible work in their computer
systems in order to more accurately support challenges of coordination and control that
workers face. In studies of hospital orderlies, the use of an institution-wide system displaying
outstanding tasks, task assignments, progress of tasks, and location of these workers helps
nurses coordinate work otherwise invisible to them [38]. Unruh and Pratt [44] suggest that
patients’ efforts to address their own health issues are often invisible to healthcare providers;
these efforts should be made known to healthcare providers, who could then support these
patients in more personal ways. To identify invisible work, research work may be carried out
with analysis of corporate databases to identify new work practices [46], and survey studies
could identify informal social networks within a company [6].
There have been few studies on the use of work reviews to identify invisible work. Irani and
Silberman [17] examined a website, called Turkopticon, that allows Amazon Mechanical Turk
(AMT) workers to review their employers, and openly share their reviews with other
workers. Reviewers rated their employers along four criteria: communicativity, generosity,
fairness, and promptness. Reviewers also need to fill in a text comment to explain their
ratings. To avoid employers’ retribution, Turkopticon allows these reviewers to
pseudonymize their identities. Since AMT does not allow these workers to interact with each
other, the researchers found that such review systems, by openly sharing the review results,
allow the workers to inform each other of potential hazards of their employment [17].
But corporate work reviews, whether conducted in a top-down or bottom-up manner (see
[2,13,31]), have tended to be closed-door and private, in order to avoid the negative reviews
creating embarrassment for the reviewees [43]. Such closed-door reviews limit the utility of
corporate reviews to openly disclose invisible work to subordinates and co-workers. This
issue could be averted, as demonstrated by a study by Smith and Marra [36], by introducing
a positive review only system. Smith and Marra [36] designed an Employee Recognition
Program, which through an institutional website, collected nominations for quarterly awards
to outstanding IT staffs [36]. The award categories include “role model,” “innovator,” and
“outreach.” Three voluntary employees acted as judges for the award nominees, who were
anonymized throughout the judging process. Interestingly, this review process was able to
identify an outstanding awardee whose identity was previously unbeknownst to most of the
management team [36].
The Turkopticon and the Employee Recognition Program suggest that work reviews are a
viable means of allowing workers to reveal invisible work. Also, when corporate social media
users actively participate on the platform, this activity could foster opportunities for
collaboration [7,15,26]. But for corporate work review systems, there are two further issues
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which designers have to resolve. One, when these reviews are tied to promotion or pay raise,
they invite employees to abuse them for political purposes [22,35]. Studies of corporate
appraisals have found that supervisors often use positive reviews to inflate the performance
of those whom they want to encourage or promote, and use negative reviews to discourage
those they like to reprimand or dismiss [22,30]. Thus, while work reviews may expose
invisible work, they also challenge designers to consider ways to minimize negative
influences by organizational politics.
Two, workers need to be properly incentivized to engage in using such a work review system.
For example, in the case of the Employee Recognition Program, Smith and Marra [36] found
that the program’s design around quarterly awards seem to attract more reviews of “earth-
shattering accomplishments” but missed many of the mundane but important everyday work
contributions [36]. To engage workers in review of day-to-day activities, more timely
incentives may be given. For example, Scissors, et al. [33] found that timely rewards of
Facebook’s “Like” indicators helped signal social validation and support to users, thus
engaging them to use the platform. Such incentives could also come in forms of social
feedback, such as blog readers acknowledging the work of blog writers [12]. While social
recognition and social feedback are important incentives, Bailey and Horvitz [3] argued that
in corporate settings, most employees may also find financial rewards necessary.
When considering ways to reveal invisible work, Star and Strauss [37] (p. 24) warn that
designers should ask questions of what practices should be made visible; and to whom, when,
and for what reasons it should be visible [29,37]. In the case of corporate systems,
transparency and visibility of some work-related details may harm employees or their
supervisors, and these ought to be carefully considered [29,37]. In addition, appropriate
forms of incentives are necessary to promote worker participation in using the system [3]. To
examine these issues, designers need to experiment with review system designs to identify
features that can reward workers for their invisible contributions without subjecting them to
unnecessary scrutiny and surveillance [29].
4 DESCRIPTION OF THE COMPLIMENTING FEATURE WITHIN THE “EX” APP
4.1 Digitizing workers’ feedback within a smartphone app
Express operates a terminal that handles air cargo at an airport in Hong Kong. Express employs
more than 2000 staff working at the terminal. In one day, Express employees can work in any
of three shifts, with eight hours in each shift covering 24 hours in one day. Shift assignment
changes once every six continuous work days. To help employees keep track of company
activities, including shift assignments, Express has created an app known as EX, which
employees can install and download from the company’s website. Nearly 90% of all Express
employees had installed EX on their personal mobile phones. Air cargo terminal staff, also
known as frontline (“前線”) staff, consisted of workers and their supervisor at the warehouses
and airfield. The frontline staff load and unload cargos from airplanes, and move them in and
out of warehouses. A small number of the frontline staff also perform administrative work
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including preparation and processing of custom, manifest, and other paperwork with airline
customers.
Our interviewees told us that the management takes the welfare of these frontline workers
seriously; and when the managers receive feedback that the frontline workers were treated
badly, these managers will reprimand their supervisors. Before the launching of the
Complimenting Feature, two feedback mechanisms were available to frontline workers and
supervisors. The first was an app function to send email messages to the company’s
management, which had been used sparingly by the workers and only for submitting
complaints and suggestions on serious matters. The second was a more commonly used
formal paper document known as the FF Form. The purpose of the FF Form was for any staff
to compliment any of their colleagues. We will call a person who makes a compliment a
“praiser,” and a person who receives one a “praisee.” Praisers need to pick up a FF Form from
the human resources department, fill out the form, and submit it to their manager. The
subsequent approval process takes months to complete. When approved, praisees receive
points which contribute to their annual appraisal. While not written in any document, the
general perception from all staff we interviewed was that the FF Form was a formal
paperwork only to be filled out by supervisors, and indeed no frontline worker had ever filled
out a FF Form.
In October 2016, the IT department of Express received an assignment to digitize the FF Form,
and incorporate it within the existing EX app. The second author was the primary designer of
the app in consultation with the first author along with developers from Express IT
department, and initial inputs from department managers and senior managers. Both authors
as well as the developers were Hong Kong residents. In the design of the Complimenting
Feature, the authors incorporated design considerations based on our understanding of use
of peer reviews, appraisals, and invisible work in different kinds of organizations. While the
department managers and senior managers of Express were not aware of the scientific
concept “invisible work,” they were supportive of the designers’ proposition to reward
contributions identified by the workers themselves. During three instances during the design
process, one of the manager also consulted with representatives of a labor union within
Express regarding designs of the submission form (see Fig. 1 (right)). These representatives
spoke on behalf of mostly frontline employees. We understood Express had consulted with
these representatives regarding any policy changes which may impact frontline workers.
While these representatives were not users themselves, their buy-in with the designs was
important to make the app appealing to workers.
In April 2017, the IT department of Express published the Complimenting Feature on the EX
app. This feature was available to all Express employees. In this study, we only focus on
examining the use experiences of the frontline workers and their supervisors. Since most of
the frontline staff were already using the EX app, the Complimenting Feature was accessible
to most of them by navigating from the EX app main menu (see Fig. 1 (left)). In order to
compliment a colleague, the praiser had to take a photograph, video, or audio recording to
indicate the context of the incident, and then input text to describe what was the praisee’s
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contribution (see Fig. 1 (right)). To provide timely feedback, the compliment was submitted
to a committee consisting of five rotating managers who were given one week - a much
improved wait time in comparison to the FF Form - to approve or disapprove the submission.
This approval process was communicated to users in promotional videos played on TV
screens in prominent areas within Express, and every worker we had interviewed was aware
of this approval process. Once the compliment had been approved, both the praisee and the
praiser will receive a notification on their EX app. If a submission has been rejected, its praiser
will also receive a notification, but which inform him the rejected reasons including “unclear
photo,” and “others.” With “others,” the committee member will be required to enter texts to
explain her reason in more detail.
Fig. 1. (left) Main menu items on the EX app; (right) design of the submission form used by Express employees to compliment their colleague.
Once a compliment has been approved, both the praiser and the praisee will each receive a
virtual token – the praiser received a star token, and the praisee a heart token (see Fig. 2
(left)). Once a user accumulated one star or five heart tokens, she could visit the human
resources department to redeem a HK$10 meal coupon. Unlike the FF Form, the star or heart
an employee received did not count towards their annual formal appraisal. From April 1,
2017 to July 6, 2018, the system recorded 2877 user login to the EX app, along with 2649
visits to the Complimenting Feature. During this period, a total of 242 star and heart tokens
had been awarded to users.
4.2 Design features: Voluntary, positive, and open review
The design team decided that, like the Turkopticon and the Employee Recognition Program,
uses of the Complimenting Feature should be voluntary. Also, this feature will only allow
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positive reviews. This positive review only consideration is in line with some social media
sites – for example, Facebook, in which the “Like” feature allows users to only give “thumbs
up” but not “thumbs down” in reaction to posts. Another consideration for positive-only
review is to avoid creating a negative environment in which criticisms may be used to harm
colleagues. Both voluntary and positive work review design were easy to implement since the
FF Form had also contained these features.
Fig. 2. (left) Once a compliment has been approved by the managers, the praiser will receive a “heart” token, and the praisee will receive a “star” token; (right) a Leadership Board within the Complimenting
Feature showing a list of top praisees.
With the FF Form, only the praiser and praisee get to know about the positive feedback. The
Complimenting Feature departed from this design of the FF Form by making the approved
compliments visible to all users. Within the feature was a Leadership Board (“龍虎榜”) which
presented a list of top praisees, ranked according to the number of compliments a praisee has
received (see Fig. 2 (right)). The idea of having a leadership board came from the second
author who believed that this will serve to promote a positive culture in which workers are
quick to compliment one another. We also believed that this design will help to make the
Complimenting Feature more social and interactive to users.
In sum, the design of the Complimenting Feature aims to supplement and improve upon the
FF Form. The FF Form remained in use during our study. In the Complimenting Feature, its key
design retained FF Form’s function of accepting voluntary and positive review, while departed
from the FF Form by being smartphone based, having a shorter approval wait time, providing
a small incentive to praisers and praisees, and providing a Leadership Board to make
approved compliments visible to all users.
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5 METHOD
We evaluated the design of the Complimenting Feature through one-to-one interviews with
19 Express employees. The interviews were arranged jointly by the human resources
department, the information technology department, and the operation department of
Express, and were conducted over two days in a meeting room at the terminal.
Participants and Recruitment
In December 2017, the two authors, with the help of a research assistant from a local
university, conducted one-to-one semi-structured interviews with 19 Express frontline
workers and supervisors. The Express management requested that our research focuses on
the frontline staffs. In early October 2017, we requested permission to conduct four
interviews per day spreading over four to five separate days. The process to obtain
permission from Express management to conduct the interviews took about one and a half
months. At the end of November 2017, we were informed by the operation department, due
to schedule constraints, that a group of 19 interviewees were available for interview in the
week of early December 2017, but only over two days. At this point, we decided to semi-
structure the interviews to focus on the most important questions.
These 19 interviewees included 11 frontline workers and eight supervisors who were users
of the Complimentary Feature. Initially, the IT department generated the list of all the
participants of the Complimenting Feature, including both praisers and praisees, who were
also frontline staffs. The IT department passed on this list to the operation department, that
worked with section supervisors and managers to identify participants who were working
day shift on the days of the interviews. These section supervisors and managers approved the
final list of interviewees. We were told that this process was otherwise random – that no
special consideration was given to the selected interviewees apart from their availability. Of
these 19 interviewees, 14 were male, and five were female; 18 of them had the experience of
either praising others (4) or being praised by others (14), while one had the experience of
both. Our interviewees had working experience at Express ranging between 3 and 23 years,
with an average experience of 13.7 years with the company. We interpreted this level of
experience among our interviewees as partly reflecting Express’ high employees’ retention
rate, and also the presence of many supervisors among our interviewees. Our interviews were
conducted during the interviewees’ work hours, and our interviewees did not receive
remuneration for their participation in this study.
The work of air cargo terminal staff is to ensure that the correct cargo is loaded and unloaded
on and off airplanes. The staff were divided into different sections within the company, and
each section may be further divided into teams. Within each team there are both workers and
supervisors. Specifically, a ground handling section takes care of loading and unloading cargo
on and off airplanes. It also takes charge of receiving and moving the unloaded cargo to the
warehouse, and delivering cargo to the right airplane according to schedule. A special
handling team is part of the ground handling section, except that it handles cargo that requires
greater care due to factors such as being oversized. A terminal service section unpacks cargo
into loose packages for easy storage and retrieval by customers; such a section also packs
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packages (e.g., individual boxes) into cargo that is shaped to fit the airplane’s capacity. Within
the terminal service section, there are administrative teams which communicate with
customers and process their paperwork such as custom forms and manifests. Due to the work
of each team and section being interconnected, collaborative work is an important element of
air terminal staff. For example, when one team becomes overwhelmed by a surge of workload,
it is common for managers and supervisors to temporarily reassign workers to support the
busy team.
Due to the scheduling constraint at Express, we decided to focus the interviews on the most
important questions. Originally, we had wanted to start off each interview with a day-in-the-
life question to obtain a greater detail of the interviewees’ routine and work culture. But to fit
up to 10 interviews in one day, we decided to only quickly touch on their general job role, and
thereafter ask about the Complimenting Feature. Naturally, many unique terminologies, work
roles, and processes used only locally within Express had emerged, which we had no time to
explore in detail. Since the interviews were recorded, we were able to consult with our liaison
at the IT department from time to time. We used these opportunities to clarify these unique
terminologies. We had also discussed with our liaison in detail to deepen our understanding
of the interviewees’ team structure and processes defining each job role. All 19 interviews
were conducted in person. Each of the interviews lasted between 20 to 30 minutes. We asked
questions including: “What do you do?” “Who do you work with every day?” “How do you feel
about praising (or being praised by) others?” “How do you think things will be different if this
feature does not exist?” “Have you claimed your rewards? And why? (if applicable)” “What
improvement would you like to see in the Complimenting Feature?” These questions were
designed to inquire into the relations between the interviewees’ daily work and their
experiences using of the Complimenting Feature.
Data Analysis
We conducted 18 interviews in Cantonese, the native Chinese language of Hong Kong, and
one in Mandarin. Both the authors and the research assistant participated in conducting the
interviews. All interviews were audio-recorded. The second author and the research assistant
transcribed the recordings in the same language, and then translated the transcriptions into
English. In this process, all interviewees’ names were anonymized and replaced with
pseudonyms (i.e., S1, S2, and so forth). The coding process was initiated when interviews
commenced, and continued after each interview. Within the schedule that the operation
department had given us, both authors and the research assistant had about 10 minutes
between interviews to discuss emerging themes. We kept track of the codes that were
emerging so as to adjust our interview questions accordingly. For example, we did not
prepare questions about the Leadership Board, but realized that users were observing this
representation to find out which of their colleagues were praised. Subsequently, we made
sure to ask this question in the interviews. We also learned about ways in which the
interviewees were excited that they could praise their superiors, peers, and colleagues in a
different team. They described tasks which they felt were important but were impossible to
report previously. It is through this process that themes of invisible work emerge and
crystallize.
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After the interviews, both authors conducted a grounded theory-based analysis of our
interview transcripts using coding and memoing [39]. The authors met twice to iteratively
identify, name, and categorize forms of invisible work and other phenomena observed in the
transcripts. In these meetings, we discussed the experience of our interviewees, the design of
the Complimenting Feature, and important themes which emerged. We reduced the codes
using axial coding until the key themes emerged. In order to validate these findings, we
submitted a report to Express IT department managers and senior managers in February
2018, utilizing similar themes and quotes presented in this paper; these management
members were excited by our findings and approved further development and promotion of
the Complimenting Feature within Express. In the next section, we present these key themes
which we found in our analysis.
6 IDENTIFYING AND REWARDING HIDDEN CONTRIBUTIONS
In this section, we describe the staff’s hidden contributions that were revealed by the users
of the Complimenting Feature. We also describe the benefits of revealing these contributions,
and issues of conflicting perspectives of what is worth complimenting.
6.1 Revealing hidden contributions
Our interviewees mentioned three criteria for a contribution to pass the bar for inclusion in
the FF Form. One, the contribution helps avert a plane delay. Two, the contribution prevents
damage to the plane’s body. Three, the contribution leads to the company receiving a
complimentary letter or email from a client. The bar to pass the FF Form criteria eliminates
contributions which do not have direct and immediate impact on the company’s bottom line.
Before the Complimenting Feature, contributions that were not entered into the FF Form were
acknowledged, but only privately. For example, a colleague may give words of thanks, such as
“okay, good, done” (“嘩,ok,掂”), or “couldn’t have done it without you.” However, these kind
words were often private interactions which remained hidden and forgotten after the fact.
For this reason, our interviewees loved the way the Complimenting Feature captured this form
of compliment in more visible ways.
Table 1 shows some of the compliments submitted by the employees. These compliments
correspond to the interviewees whose quotes were used in this paper.
Table 1. A list of compliments submitted by the Complimenting Feature users.
Interviewee Role The Compliments (edited to remove privacy information)
S01/S18 Praisee “When moving cargo though the airplane, one piece of cargo was
only a few inches smaller than the size of the cabin door. This was a
difficult job to handle. Under [S01]’s leadership, the team safely
unloaded the piece of cargo. Their team remained to complete their
tasks beyond their work hours.”
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S16 Praisee “[S16] has always been well loved by colleagues. She takes her work
seriously. Furthermore, she prepared mango pudding for us today
to motivate us! Like!”
S12 Praisee “On October 14, 2017, right before the typhoon warning was raised,
we needed to retrieve several pieces of heavy imports. This required
a heavy crane truck. [S12] patiently took several trips to retrieve the
imports in time for the customers. His professionalism is worth our
praise.”
S13 Praiser “We received a piece a cargo which, due to it having been badly
built-up, was not sitting firmly on the palette. But the client airline
wanted this cargo on the plane on August 9 [the next day]… The
three experienced staff took much time to discuss mitigating
strategies [to fulfill the customer’s needs]. This is a great example of
teamwork that is worth complimenting.”
S19 Praisee “The company’s van broke down. He helped to push it back to the
safety zone.”
S20 Praiser “On the first day after the typhoon, the flight schedule was especially
busy. [S20] sacrificed his own meal time to volunteer bringing
drinks to his co-workers working in unbearably hot weather.”
S14 Praisee “This employee and his partner identified a piece of goods as under
a certain hazard category, but without its required label. Also,
hazardous goods need to be reported and examined before loading
onto the airplane. They reported to their superior immediately and
averted a [potential] accident.”
The reported incidents varied from those that impact customers directly (e.g., S01 and S18),
to acts of friendliness such as bringing a mango pudding to co-workers (e.g., S16). Some of
these contributions, such as acts of friendliness, could not have been reported in the old paper
form since they were enacted by a supervisor to workers, or in a peer-to-peer manner.
Exposing contributions from supervisors to subordinates. Since the FF Form had to be filled
in by supervisors, supervisors themselves seldom receive compliments from subordinates. In
his case, S01, with 20 years in the company, and a supervisor of a special handling team, was
happy to get complimented. He said:
It is better to have more channels to compliment [others]. Such as you do not have to be
an airline, or to be a supervisor to be able to praise your colleagues. Even those who are
relatively [low rank], whom we called “Lo Ware” (“老 ware” or warehouse workers), or
those “Che Tau” (“車頭” or drivers), if they think their supervisors did well, they could also
pass a compliment through the app. Because in the past, it’s usually the airline or
superiors who initiated a compliment, but rarely a subordinate who praised a superior,
because if he is a subordinate he had no way to do so. But now we have a channel to do
this.
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The feature allows supervisors to feel appreciated by their subordinates, which had not
happened previously through the FF Form.
Exposing peer to peer contributions. Employees had also used the Complimenting Feature
to praise their peers for a job well done. S16, an administrator who checked manifests, with
16 years at Express, told us that she appreciated that she could compliment anyone who did
well:
From my knowledge, there’s no online complimenting before, so they made one online.
Complimenting colleagues is a good thing. So even peers could compliment each other,
not just supervisors. Because of this [FF] Form, praisers tended to also be superiors... So
this feature allows those of the same grade to also do so.
There were some workers, like S14, 17 years in the company and worked at a terminal service
section, had few experiences being praised by his supervisor, who was perhaps more
demanding in comparison to other supervisors:
Interviewer: Besides the app and this case, had there been an instance where the
supervisor told you that you did well?
S14: No, supervisors won’t
Interviewer: Like not even verbally?
S14: Nah, those supervisors won’t
Interviewer: Ok
S14: Supervisors rarely rarely do [praise you].
Users like S16 and S14 welcome the ability to praise their peers, and for themselves - to feel
appreciated more often for their contributions to the company.
Exposing contributions across sections/departments. In corporate appraisals, employees
are often only assessed for their contribution within their own department. This form of
appraisal tends to overlook help an employee has rendered to colleagues of other teams; but
the Complimenting Feature exposed some of these contributions. One such inter-
departmental collaborative practice that was often mentioned was “lai foo” (“拉夫”), used
among employees at Express to mean temporary reassignment of a staff to a different team.
In the Chinese language, the literal meaning of “lai foo” is the forcing of civilians to perform
involuntary labor for the military. And among Hong Kong people, “lai foo” (as in “臨時拉夫”) is
figuratively used to refer to a sudden request for someone to do a task which he or she did
not expect. For example, S12, who operated a forklift, and worked 16 years at Express, was
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“lai foo” to assist colleagues of a different section with a forklift when a typhoon warning was
raised. He said:
S12: Oh yes, I often get [“lai foo”]. But I am here for many years and have worked in quite
a number of different roles.
Interviewer: Because you are familiar [with the roles]?
S12: I am familiar and some supervisors know that, they will ask me to help with “lai foo.”
Interviewer: Are there people who would not get assigned to “lai foo?” Are you simply
more agreeable?
S12: I don’t mind as I know how to do the work. But some other people would take it to
heart. They would feel that you were always approaching them and would feel unhappy. Interviewer: Is it because other colleagues are not familiar with the job role, so they are
uncomfortable doing it?
S12: Some of them are. But some of them are not. Some of them think that it is wrong to
keep approaching them.
S12 told us that in the past, “nothing happens” after “lai foo,” that is, he was not rewarded in
any way. While he had always obliged to being “lai foo,” such activities were never reported
or documented, and few others knew about his additional work. But with the new feature, he
said that now more people get to know “after you have done something good.” At Express, “lai
foo” was beyond the formal job scope of employees. As such, some employees perceived that
it was not their job. This made helpful employees like S12 unique, valuable, and deserving of
recognition. Compliments such as this exposed collaboration between supervisors and
subordinates, between peers, and across teams which may otherwise go unnoticed.
6.2 Benefits of revealing hidden contributions
The Complimenting Feature brought benefits by bringing work satisfaction to praisees,
publicizing and promoting good practices, and to directly notifying the management
regarding hidden practices.
Notification brings pride to praisees. Several interviewees mentioned they had little time to
use the feature at all, even though nearly all interviewees had used the EX app on a daily basis
to check their work schedule. It was mostly during these instances, when they looked at their
schedule, that the praisees first saw notifications that they had been complimented. Nearly
all praisees expressed a sense of excitement and appreciation when they saw notifications
that they were praised. For example, S16 said:
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I saw [the notification] and I think it’s pretty good. [It happened] when I was working
hard, when everybody was very busy, and suddenly, I saw a praise. [And it happened]
when I felt dull and bored with my work, and this notification appeared unexpectedly.
Oh, that’s pretty interesting… I felt like I did well in my work.
According to some of our interviewees, the FF Form approval process took a long time, and
during this period, both the supervisor and the employee would not receive any feedback
regarding its progress. For example, S13, a service terminal supervisor who had spent 23
years with the company, had praised his workers who had skipped lunch to work through the
entire shift due to manpower shortage and the sudden arrival of an unexpected volume of
cargo. S13 told us that:
If their physical conditions can sustain that work load, I had arranged for them to take
their meal after they were off work. I think that such colleagues [who were willing to go
the extra mile to ensure that work got done] were rare, and not many people were willing
to do so. They were worth complimenting.
S13 had submitted six or more FF Forms in the past, and he compared the app feature to the
FF Form:
[When we used the FF Form] we received no feedback. We did not know whether the
form had been approved or rejected. However, if I used EX app to compliment my peers,
I can see feedback. If the case was approved, the app will send us a message to notify me.
That’s what happened.
Such a short feedback cycle and pleasant surprises help fuel praisees’ motivation to continue
working in the best interest of their colleagues and the company. But according to some of
our interviewees, the one-week approval time remained a little too long. The reason was that
compliments are motivating only if they are given shortly after the incident. Currently, the
wait time was unevenly distributed between one day and a week (depending on the manager
performing the approval).
Leadership Board publicized and promoted good practices. The Leadership Board
displayed top praisees. Even for users who were busy, they could simply pay attention to the
Leadership Board to see who had been complimented, and for what reason they had been
complimented. In doing so, some users saw that the Leadership Board was in fact publicizing
good practices. For example, S19, 4 years with the company, who loaded and unloaded cargo
at the ramp of the airplane as a ground handler, told us:
If there is rubbish on the airfield, such as in the case of cargo flight, even for the passenger
flight, the rubbish will affect the safety of the flight. Rubbish can get into the plane engine.
The colleague who picked up the rubbish definitely deserved a compliment. [Even] if the
flight was [only] delayed from taking off, it would also have a very negative impact. What
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I saw so far, those compliments could serve as warnings for others, and make them pay
more attention to safety issues.
S20 provided a complementary statement that such publicity was promoting reciprocity of
good practices. He said:
Or we can put it like this: if a guy is browsing the app, then he knows, oh, this guy got
praised, then that’s pretty good, and we put out cases that are specifically praiseworthy.
Then we can post it on the notice board so that other people know and share the case to
them. Then everybody’s like, oh, this company is full of positivity (“正面”). There are many
things that are praiseworthy, and many people are praising others. So [this guy] will
imitate, or... yeah, yeah, like following what they were doing, just like that…. There are
some workers like, oh, he, it’s simple, you are ground handler and I am also a ground
handler, why did he get praised? Then he will probably check what is going on.
This publicity may have an additional effect of increasing the sense of collegiality among
employees, as S16 mentioned:
Yes, I want to get to know these colleagues, or else I would never know they existed.
2000 employees [at Express]! Now I can depend on the app, and look at it once in a while.
Then there may be a chance I will get to know these colleagues. Even though I do not
have a chance right now, this does not mean I will not be working with them in the future.
Primarily, the users had watched the Leadership Board out of curiosity—who were
complimented, and why they were complimented. However, these interviewees saw the
unexpected benefit of this action creating “positivity” in the work environment, and
mediating a cycle of workers reciprocating good practices towards each other.
We asked interviewees if they had picked up their vouchers. It turned out none of them did.
When we asked why they did not redeem their rewards, the most common response was
confusion regarding ways of redeeming the voucher, and also the time they had to put into
visiting the human resources department in exchange for a HK$10 (~US$1.30) voucher.
When we asked for an ideal amount for such a reward, they mentioned that the reward
needed to be tangible and immediately usable. In this regard, S14 asked for HK$50
(~US$6.40) vouchers, while S18, a supervisor working with a special handling team who had
spent 16 years with the company, said, “I feel like 10 or 8HKD (cash) isn’t too outrageous. I
mean – you don’t get praised every day, right?”
Compliments online provide a direct line of feedback to the company’s management.
Large firms like Express are commonly structured as a multi-layer hierarchy, so its feedback
channels which move from one layer to another may sometimes distort information which
originated from ground-level staff. S18 had this to say in our interview:
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S18: Why? If for every frontline worker who gives feedback, and we have to convey them
upwards layer by layer, then it will be very slow.
Researcher: Oh, layer by layer?
S18: Yeah, if he tells me, I tell my boss, and my boss tells his boss, I don’t know how long
will it take to fix the problem. And maybe when it reaches the executives the thing will
be distorted. Maybe the truth, the thing they demand is distorted. But now we can
directly let the COO know.
Researcher: But the app is an open platform that everyone can see the same thing, the
same message.
S18: Yes.
Similarly, S08, a ground handing supervisor, who worked 11 years at Express, told us:
S08:[T]he rewards are beside the point… so long as our executives know that we poured
our “sweat and blood” (“博了命,賣力了”) [into this job]. [Also] by complimenting my own
subordinates, not us [supervisors] in particular, they could work harder for us the next
time, and help us complete the job.
Interviewer:When you said “executives,” how high above you in rank are you talking
about?
S08:Higher than my own boss [laugh]. Level four or above! I am level two. My boss is
level three.
Currently, how the management at Express may make use of this information was out of the
scope of our study. However, along with the ways S18 and S08 were happy that the
Complimenting Feature was able to increase visibility of their teams’ effort to the management.
6.3 Conflicting perspectives of what constitutes legitimate contributions
A clear definition of what constitutes a contribution is needed in order to standardize the
approval process. But since the compliments emerged bottom-up based on individual
employees’ experience, everyone may have a different idea of what counts as a praiseworthy
contribution.
To our interviewees, it was clear that contributions that can be entered into the FF Form were
not disputed by interviewees as legitimate contributions in the Complimenting Feature. This
includes any contribution that prevents a plane delay or damage, and delights the customer.
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Also, contributions that include experienced employees teaching or mentoring less
experienced employees, and in the process providing clear and useful instructions, were also
undisputed in our interviews. For example, S17, 17 years in the company, who received cargo
in the warehouse, complimented her trainer who instructed her on forklift operations. She
described her instructor as “really patient to [us] who were just a blank piece of paper.”
However, contributions which include doing work few wanted to do seem to invite suspicion
among interviewees. This includes the contentious compliment of “picking up trash.” For
example, S07, who spent 7 years in the company and worked with a terminal service section,
complained that “everything could be submitted to EX… even like picking trash, and you got
praised for this. I don’t even know if it was real.” However, we may consider alternate views
such as those of S14, who was also with a different terminal service section, and said that
picking up trash was taken for granted by some colleagues; few actually did so regularly:
Yeah, yeah. Like sometimes at my work place there are many plastic wraps or cardboard
cylinders. Sometimes when we were working we could step on the wrap and slip. This
caused many work accidents. But when it was me working I will return [the wraps] to the
right places, so it won’t affect my colleagues… But some people would just leave the
wraps [at dangerous places]. It is useless if it was only me doing this. You need to have
everybody do this. Like there are so many people working in the third [and] fourth floor.
From S14’s personal experience, few employees in his section had bothered to routinely
perform this safety practice. The observation that some important practices, while simple to
perform, were considered menial among many staff corroborated S12’s statement regarding
“lai foo,” and S19’s statement about picking up trash at the airfield. Despite being personally
important, some reviews will not be seen as equally legitimate by every staff member. This
creates a design question of how to formalize informal compliments within an organization.
7 DISCUSSION
With regard to Star and Strauss’ [37] question of what invisible work practices should be
made visible, the Complimenting Feature chose the novel design of revealing voluntary and
positive reviews among employees, and to make these reviews openly visible to all app users.
Building on previous studies of similar systems [17,36], we found further evidence that such
a voluntary and open work review system is able to identify workers’ day-to-day and
mundane contributions, including those from supervisors towards their workers and vice
versa, from workers towards other workers, and to colleagues in a different section of the
company. The formalization of these contributions as representations within a mobile app
also motivates praisees and may mediate social learning among users. But there are issues of
legitimizing informal practices within a formal organization and privacy concerns which
designers need to resolve. In this section, we will discuss this review system and its successes
and challenges, and also suggest how researchers and designers of corporate systems can
leverage our findings in identifying invisible work.
7.1 Invisible work identified through voluntary, positive, and open work reviews
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The invisible work complimented by our interviewees was in line with forms of work
described in previous studies [27,37], which include practices of supportive supervisors, and
work that management has taken for granted. As our interviewees commented, supervisors
had never received positive feedback from their workers before – for example, S01, who felt
the need for having more forms of feedback channels. Invisible work such as that mentioned
by S01 was previously hidden at Express by what Star and Strauss [37] call indicator
manipulation. In our study, indicator manipulation was embodied in the use of the FF Form,
which was limited to a supervisor complimenting a subordinate and only under pretext of
financial impact to the company (e.g., averting physical damage to the airplane). By working
around these limitations, the Complimenting Feature opens up new channels of feedback to
uncover practices which would not be reported previously. For these reasons, nearly all our
interviewees were excited about the Complimenting Feature. In studies of invisible work, non-
persons refer to people who are seen as lower class, socially discriminated, and ignored (e.g.,
slaves, servants, and manual labors); as such, the work of non-persons are often taken for
granted and become invisible [27,29]. In our study, even though we found lower ranked
workers, called “Lo Ware” or “Che Tau,” they were not explicitly ignored, and S01 was happy
to be able to receive their feedback. This was perhaps due to how the Express management
was already supportive of their frontline workers (i.e., by allowing them to make complains
through emails).
In most organizations, work that is performed across departments, and requires
improvisation and articulation, is very likely to become invisible [23,32], but the
Complimenting Feature was able to identify this type of work. At Express, many workers were
unhappy to receive “lai foo,” which was thankless work clearly outside of their job scope.
There were a few, like S12, who did not mind “lai foo,” and such workers who went above and
beyond can become more visible within the company. Another example of thankless work
includes that of the emotional labor of an employee caring for her co-workers (e.g., bringing
them drinks – S20).
7.2 Revealing invisible work as motivators and mediators of social learning
In our study, we found that the positive and open reviews not only revealed invisible work,
but also motivated employees to take initiative and may mediate social learning.
By allowing only positive feedback (i.e., compliments), the designers can avoid pitfalls of
negative criticism damaging collegial relationship between employees. After seeing positive
reviews of other colleagues, users like S16 can look forward to “working with them in the
future.” In comparison, previous design of work review systems like the Turkopticon elicited
both positive and negative feedback about AMT employers. While this helped workers avert
potential hazards of their employment, the Turkopticon had to be designed as an anonymous
system for fear of employers’ retribution [17]. But anonymous persons cannot be rewarded
and recognized openly by a company. Thus anonymity eliminates opportunities for workers
to reveal who they are and to leverage their reputation to work with new colleagues. The
Complimenting Feature’s choice of eliciting positive and open reviews had identified other
beneficial effects.
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First, our interviewees found the experience motivating and collegial. S16 said “I felt like I did
well in my work.” Apart from the pleasant surprise of being complimented on something
unexpected, two other reasons for feeling motivated were that the praisers and praisees were
able to see the compliment while the event was fresh in their memory, and also that their co-
workers were able to see their compliments on the Leadership Board. This latter design
feature contrasted with common corporate appraisal systems, in which results were only
made known to the direct employees and their supervisors. By receiving fast feedback and
seeing the results published openly, the employees may thus receive social validation and
better sense of social support over their own initiatives (see [33]). Through this process, even
work not known to the managers (but witnessed by co-workers) could get recognized.
Second, the sense that there are colleagues who are putting in additional efforts in their work
may inspire social learning. S20 described her growing sense of “positivity” at the company
after seeing so many colleagues complimenting each other. One way in which compliments
may inspire learning is when users began to imitate positive work practices. For example, S19
suggested that the compliments may help remind users of the importance of taking safety
measures. Another way in which compliments may inspire learning is by motivating others
to do likewise or even better. Such social comparison is also an important aspect of pre-
industrial gift economies [24]. Mauss [24] (p. 95) describes a gift hierarchy in some tribal
villages:
Between chiefs and their vassals, between vassals and their tenants, through such gifts a
hierarchy is established. To give is to show one’s superiority, to be more, to be higher in
rank, magister. To accept without giving in return, or without giving more back, is to
become client and servant, to become small, to fall lower (minister).
We argue that users who saw that their co-workers were publicized by the app felt a similar
obligation to reciprocate contributions. For example, S20 suggested that one effect of
publicizing the compliments is to invite the other workers to reflect on how they could do
better, “Why did he get praised (but not me)?” In many ways, these comments suggest that
the positive and open feedback invites users to participate in a social process of peer
recognition, comparison, competition, and learning often seen in practices of online
communities [18,20].
In comparison with the CSCW social learning concept, situated learning [21], the form of
learning we observed did not go as far as users developing a community of practice. However,
our interviewees’ objects of learning, like those of a community of practice, are unmistakably
informal and situated. For example, S13’s workers who skipped lunch to ensure timely
delivery to their customers did not adhere to formal procedure but adapted to a contingency
situation. Another characteristic of situated and informal learning is that their learning intent
arose voluntarily [11]. And with the Complimenting Feature, employees’ learning motivation
came from a self-driven desire to learn after seeing good performers being commended
publicly and openly. In comparison, formal review mechanisms used in companies have
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tended to use negative reviews, or criticisms, to forcefully set learning goals for their
employees – so that the learning intent was imposed on them [43]. In other words, revealing
informal practices may help support situated learning among employees.
Thus, revealing positive and hidden work practices can be more than just revealing unsung
labor and heroes at a workplace; it may establish trust and social relationship, and create
admiration and competition, which help make up the fabric of social learning. From the ways
our interviewees cared about the compliments, we argue that this design mediates
development of a social system centered around collaborative work (e.g., teaching a
newcomer, or working tirelessly alongside co-workers), and may foster inter-departmental
collaboration [7,15,26].
7.3 Legitimizing invisible work through voluntary disclosure
The work review system publicized positive and informal discourses (e.g., a quick word of
thanks) surrounding hidden practices which may encourage social comparison and learning.
But while this informal review system appears to provide benefits to a company, two
questions remain. One, informal practices can be a contentious topic within formal and
bureaucratic organization. Thus, how can this informal review system be legitimized, or kept
separated from formal processes, within a bureaucratic organization? Two, with rapid
development of networked technologies in companies, there are growing concern that forms
of electronic monitoring systems could infringe on workers’ privacy [1,4]. Thus, how could a
work review system be designed to address this concern?
To address the first question, the Express management has chosen not to include compliments
received by praisees on the Complimenting Feature in their annual review. This exclusion of
informal compliments from annual reviews thus separate informal and formal review
systems. We believe that this also helps prevent the Complimenting Feature from being
abused (as is often the case of formal appraisals) to further political agenda within the
company. For example, employees could abuse the system by colluding and giving favorable
reviews to their close friends [30]. Rather, praisees (and also praisers) were rewarded with a
small token voucher for their contribution and involvement. And the positive reviews can still
complement formal appraisals - which collect constructive criticism. Upon receiving a
compliment, our interviewees suggested that only a small and easy to redeem token reward
is necessary and appropriate, and we perceived the reason being that this app was operating
in a corporate setting [3] – and the token reward was serving as an official acknowledgment
from the company and formal closure to the review. Note that interviewees like S14 had
suggested the current reward amount was too small, which led us to suggest that the amount
should not be seen as trivial by users or these compliments may be perceived as less
meaningful than they deserve.
To address the second concern, CSCW is indeed seeing more studies making use of potentially
invasive data collection through devices such as video surveillance, smartphone monitoring,
GPS, and social media to surveil workers [38,46]. This presents an ethical dilemma to
designers, as West and Bowman [45] argued, from an ethical perspective, that while workers
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do not want these technologies to be used to incite fear, distrust, anxiety, and hostility at their
workplaces (see also [1]), they do want their successes and good performance to be collected
and documented. West and Bowman’s [45] argument is much in line with Star and Strauss’s
[37] stance – that some invisible work practices are meant to be invisible, which the
management should not aim to collect – and there are others which workers want to be made
visible. The use of voluntary disclosure in the Complimenting Feature may have allowed the
workers to selectively publicize only the successes and good performances which they feel
appropriate to be made known to others. This provides one explanation why we did not hear
privacy concerns raised by the workers during our interviews. This workers’ control over
why, what, and how technologies collect and process data may thus be critical in informing
the ethical design of such work review systems.
Allowing employees to choose whose contribution they like to compliment has another
advantage of referring to praisers’ local expertise in determining the true (situated) value of
a work practice. Unavoidably, when invisible work surfaces as a compliment, other employees
from a different team may find the review incredulous. But the nature of invisible work is
such that its value is only known to workers who are in the thick of action. For example, it
may be the rarity of certain practices within a local team that makes the work, as mundane as
it seems, valuable. Thus, voluntary participation avoids revealing backstage work and
promotes local practices which help maintain what Star and Strauss describe as “arenas of
voices” within the company. The compliments displayed within the information system thus
help amplify these “voices.”
8 CONCLUSION
In this study, we examined the work review feature of a corporate app used by employees of
an air cargo handling company based in Hong Kong. The feature contained unique design
considerations commonly seen in social media which include accepting voluntary and
positive feedback (i.e., compliments), and openly publishing reviews to all users via a
leadership board. We interviewed 19 air cargo terminal staff regarding their use experiences.
We found that the positive and open work review system was able to identify invisible
employee contributions including those from supervisors towards their workers and vice
versa, from workers towards other workers, and to colleagues from a different team. Upon
seeing so many of their colleagues engaging in positive practices, our interviewees found the
experience motivating and collegial. From our interviews, there was evidence that this feature
was able to mediate self-driven desire to learn from good practices published on the app
feature. One issue was that some employees disputed the legitimacy of some of the positive
reviews, which raises questions of how could or should invisible work be legitimized, and
what kind? We argue that this is a classic problem in designing to reveal invisible work and
suggest ways to strike a balance between formal and informal practices. We end the paper
with a discussion of ethical and privacy issues concerning electronic data collection of
invisible work practices.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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We thank the human resources department, information technology department, and
operation department of the company for their generous help in arranging the interviews
within the staff’ work hours. We also would like to thank all the interviewees for sharing their
experiences with us.
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