Hybrid Life: How to Work from Everywhere

09/29/2023

The pandemic opened the opportunity for us to work remotely. The flexibility of schedules and locations enabled us to switch between different roles. The flourishing of diverse technology granted us more self-governance to curate our lives. Working from home, remote working is normal in lots of industries especially those that don’t request specific job sites, equipment, or setups.

Self-governance in post-pandemic life and work is an opportunity and challenge.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security identifies essential workers as those who conduct a range of operations and services that are typically essential to continue critical infrastructure operations (The Department of Homeland Security, 2021). 37 percent of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home, with significant variation across cities and industries (Dingel and Neiman, 2020). A survey done by McKinsey & Company shows that 58 percent of employed respondents say they can work from home at least part of the time, and 65 percent of employed respondents say they would be willing to do so all the time (Dua et al., 2022). Research from Stanford University shows 40 percent of US employees now working remotely at least one day a week (Barrero et al., 2023).

The productivity of remote work also depends on the mode. Fully remote work is associated with about 10 percent lower productivity than fully in-person work. Challenges with communicating remotely, barriers to mentoring, building culture, and issues with self-motivation appear to be factors that lower productivity. Effectiveness aside, fully remote work can also generate larger cost reductions from space usage and hiring (Barrero et al., 2023).

For a lot of us, with a device connected to the internet, we can work from anywhere. Home and offices, parks and classrooms, cafeterias, and conference rooms, we see the blend of these physical spaces. Is this a sign of the resolving of space functions? What technologies can be used to improve work efficiency in a hybrid environment? Can in-person interactions between people be recreated through virtual connection?

Different from work-from-home or remote work, the concept of working from everywhere indicates the flexible adaptation of working modes in different physical environments with psychological preparation. This requires micro-environments created around individuals to facilitate work efficiency. This paper studies a three-step framework of designing the micro-environment to support work from everywhere by creating a Mixed Reality world.

“Working from everywhere “ is a dynamic of working in different physical environments with sustainable psychological preparation.

1- Managing visual and acoustic distractions from the context environment

Virtual and acoustic input from the context environment are the two main distractions to disturb our attention. Visual working memory (WM) must maintain relevant information, despite the constant influx of both relevant and irrelevant information. Attentional control mechanisms help determine which of this new information gets access to our capacity-limited WM system (Hakim et al., 2021).

Previous research shows that targets involving objects that animate motion do indeed capture visual attention. Those that underwent animated motions were responded to more quickly than targets involving objects that underwent inanimate motion (Pratt et al., 2010). In addition, noise can significantly reduce people's performance in experience-based decision-making by increasing the likelihood of choosing the option with the lower expected value (Sheng et al., 2022).

Everyone builds the bubble of attention control to filter environmental information input.

Our real-world environment, both natural and man-made, is filled with various virtual and acoustic elements. But virtual reality has more flexibility in controlling different environmental elements. Current augmented reality (AR) technology focuses on overlaying virtual reality (VR) objects onto the real world to enhance the spatial experience. However, managing distractions from the context involves the detection, mediation, and removal of real-world objects/elements can also be achieved through mixed reality.

Computer vision techniques are used to edit images and videos. It can be applied to achieve the filtering of real-world scenarios to create a pleasant visual world for work. Researchers in the field of computer vision propose using a fusion of depth information and RGB features based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) to detect moving objects (Bi et al., 2022). More advanced than CNN, the YOLOv4 algorithm is used to improve the accuracy of object detection under special conditions (Lu, 2023). Generative adversarial networks (GAN) have led to significant progress in various image manipulation tasks. A model learns to find and remove objects from general scene images using image-level labels and unpaired data in a GAN framework is used to edit adversarial scenes (Shett, 2018). Another system is proposed to edit and synthesize videos containing multiple, possibly crossing objects, with complex motions, and dynamic textures (Le et al., 2019).

2- Restoring attention through a connection with nature

There are six main areas that are affected by mental fatigue: input, thinking, behavior, executive functioning, emotions, and social interactions (Kaplan & Berman, 2010). Goal-directed attention is affected the most by mental fatigue, while stimulus-driven attention is minimally affected or not at all affected by mental fatigue.

Directed attention, essential in goal achieving requires effort.

Attention restoration theory (ART) separates attention into two components: involuntary attention, where attention is captured by inherently intriguing or important stimuli, and voluntary or directed attention, where attention is directed by cognitive-control processes (Berman et al., 2009). Directed attention requires effort, plays a certain role in achieving focus, is under voluntary control (at least some of the time), is susceptible to fatigue, and controls distraction using inhibition (Kaplan, 1995). Work especially with high intelligence challenges involves directed attention control, which leads to mental fatigue easily.

ART asserts that people can concentrate better after spending time in nature or looking at scenes of nature. The capacity of the brain to focus on a specific stimulus or task is limited and results in “directed attention fatigue”. (Kaplan & Kaplan, 1989). Unlike natural environments, urban environments contain stimulation (e.g., car horns) that captures attention dramatically and additionally requires directed attention to overcome that stimulation (e.g., avoiding traffic, ignoring advertising, etc.), making urban environments less restorative (Berman et al., 2009).

The natural elements and environment help restore attention.

While involved in the virtual world, how to stay connected to the natural environment? While the geolocation of work is unpredictable, how to have constant access to natural resources or its equivalent in the virtual world?

Duplicating natural exposure via media devices and virtual reality is deemed a promising technology due to its advantage in creating a sense of immersion (Li, 2021). The main types of simulation for virtual environments are real-scene-based 360°videos and computer-generated (CG) scenarios (Yeo et al., 2020). Some studies found that virtual nature may promote restrictiveness, which deals with the restoration of attention fatigue (Browning et al., 2019; Mattila et al., 2020). A study reported the positive effect of virtual nature on cognitive performance (Mostajeran et al., 2021), which could be related to its restrictiveness (Shin, 2011). The virtual environments for virtual nature are usually created based on high-quality and pleasant landscapes; thus, they may offer viewers optimized experiences and improve psychological and physiological outcomes (Mattila et al., 2020). However, compared with real nature, the absence of other sensory stimuli in virtual nature (Mattila et al. 2020) and the lack of physical engagement, such as walking and contact with things in nature, make the brain process information differently from reality, resulting in some environmental factors being masked or ignored (Taube et al., 2013).

3- Enhancing effective Interaction with human beings through the virtual world

Physical contact, mediated by the sense of touch, is an essential part of social communication providing the experience of actual togetherness, which can be defined as social presence (van Erp and Toet, 2015). Current communication systems, such as videoconferencing, social media use and engagement with virtual reality activities, do not support sensory feedback through the sense of touch and they have been shown to be not sufficient to prevent social isolation and loneliness (Usta et al., 2014; Twenge et al., 2019; Boursier et al., 2020). Another concern with interacting through virtual connection is the worser feeling of fatigue and social drainage.

Enhancing human interaction through physical and digital interfaces is the key to effective virtual communication.

Specifically, the term “Zoom fatigue” refers to the overuse of videoconferencing for work. Researchers from Stanford University found that there are four reasons that lead to zoom fatigue:

• Excessive amounts of close-up eye contact are highly intense.

• Seeing yourself during video chats constantly in real-time is fatiguing.

• Video chats dramatically reduce our usual mobility.

• The cognitive load is much higher in video chats.

Seeing the wide application of virtual reality in various areas, how to enhance effective and sustainable interaction between human beings? How to cultivate new user habits conveying the same effects of real-world physical touch?

In recent research, haptic and tactile virtual reality studies have been creating new attempts to mimic the sense of touch through different materials and approaches. An electronic skin that can mimic the same process that causes a finger, toe, or limb to move when poked or scalded is developed (Wang et al., 2023).

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