curbing resource consumption using team based feedback

Copyright 2010 Digital Enterprise Research Institute. All rights reserved.

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

Curbing Resource Consumption Using Team-Based Feedback

Souleiman Hasan1, Richard Medland2, Marcus Foth2, Edward Curry1

1 Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland2 Urban Informatics Research Lab, Queensland University of Technology & NICTA, Australia

[email protected]://www.StefanDecker.org/

In proceedings of The 8th International Conference on Persuasive Technology (2013), Sydney, Australia.


Outline

Motivation and Background Paper consumption Previous work and research question Individual vs. team-based feedback

Experiment Setting Environment Print monitoring Persuasive strategies Procedure

Results and Discussion Conclusions

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Motivation

Of the global wood harvest for “industrial uses” 42% goes to paper production, a proportion expected to grow by more than 50 percent in the next 50 years. (Abramovitz, “Paper Cuts”, WorldWatch Institute, 1999, p. 124)

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Previous Work & Question

Using flavoured feedback to curb paper printing (Medland et al., 2010)

Focused on individualistic feedback Question: “Can membership in a group be

leveraged to persuade individuals to change their behaviour, and hence the group overall behaviour?”

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Individual-based Feedback

Individual vs. Team-based

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Team-based Feedback

Individual vs. Team-based

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Outline




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Case Study Environment

DERI 130 staff members Interns, masters, PhDs, post-docs, research assistants,

research fellows, senior research fellows, professors, technical staff, and administrative staff

20 organisational units Reasons for printing

– Administrative printing by administrative and research staff.

– Printing research proposals, theses, academic and technical reports.

– Printing academic papers for internal review and reading purposes.

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Print Monitoring

Monitoring software on the print server

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Persuasive Strategies

Informative Traditional statistics Eco-metric statistics

Social Comparative Competitive

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Experimental Procedure

Data was aggregated and displayed weekly October 2010- May 2011: Baseline (w 1-31,35) May 2011- October 2011: Feedback provided

(w31, 35-58) Voluntary participants

Measure Person proportional printing over all printing every week

Team MembersUnit 1 Members 1, 2, 3,4Unit 2 Members 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10Unit 3 Members 11, 12, 13Unit 4 Members 14, 15, 16

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Outline




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Results: Individual Printing

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Results: Statistical Significance

Difference sample normally distributed The Anderson-Darling test P-value = 0.343 Q-Q plot confirms normality

Paired t-test Standard level of significance alpha = 0.05 P-value = 0.025

It is statistically significant to say that the feedback method helped decrease the individuals’ proportional printing after it was applied

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Team Level Printing

All units except unit 2 reduced overall unit printing.

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Discussion

Previous survey revealed three themes Theme 1

Any printing conducted by staff was viewed as necessary, excepting accidents.

Theme 2 Staff viewed different metrics as relevant or

alternatively, as unnecessary for feedback on printing behaviour.

Theme 3 Staff viewed co-workers championing reduced paper use

as a helpful reminder to be conscious of how much they were printing.

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Theme 1

All printing is necessary About 31% of the participants – showed a slight

increase in their proportional printing Likely that the driving force behind the non-

responsive people is Theme 1. Any feedback method needs to address fully or

partially this theme to get better results e.g. by changing business processes

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Theme 2

Flavoured feedback Software in this experiment applied various

flavours in tandem Stating the same information in different ways

that address different models of individual perception is in fact a good feature of feedback methods

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Theme 3

Comparison and competition Temporal comparison

Contrasts team printing performance in a week to performance the week prior.

Social comparison Compares printing performance on a team-to-team basis

Feedback method has been able to form an incentive for individuals to lower printing.

Some teams did not respond Outliers exist and affect overall unit performance Future work: hybrid personal and team-based feedback

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Conclusions

Team-based feedback is persuasive. Applying several strategies in tandem helps

decrease divergence of outliers TODO

Study the effect of communities dynamics Test hypothesis with other types of resources: e.g.

energy consumption

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curbing resource consumption using team based feedback

Technology

research staff

research assistants

printing research proposals

research question individual

worldwatch institute

senior research fellows

printing behaviour

theywere printing