Understanding the impact of personal feedback on face-to-face interactions in the workplace

Face-to-face interactions have proven to accelerate team and larger organisation success. Many past research has explored the benefits of quantifying face-to-face interactions for informed workplace management, however to date, little attention has been paid to understand how the feedback on interaction behaviour is perceived at a personal scale. In this paper, we offer a reflection on the automated feedback of personal interactions in a workplace through a longitudinal study. We designed and developed a mobile system that captured, modelled, quantified and visualised face-to-face interactions of 47 employees for 4 months in an industrial research lab in Europe. Then we conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 employees to understand their perception and experience with the system. Our findings suggest that the short-term feedback on personal face-to-face interactions was not perceived as an effective external cue to promote self-reflection and that employees desire long-term feedback annotated with actionable attributes. Our findings provide a set of implications for the designers of future workplace technology and also opens up avenues for future HCI research on promoting self-reflection among employees.