Retrofitting Meetings for Psychological Safety
This addresses the problem of low employee morale and productivity in meetings for organizations, but it is incremental as it builds on existing meeting tools.
The paper identifies psychological safety as an underexplored design element in meeting tools and argues that an interdisciplinary approach could create new tools to retrofit meetings for psychological safety, presenting both research opportunities and challenges.
Meetings are the fuel of organizations' productivity. At times, however, they are perceived as wasteful vaccums that deplete employee morale and productivity. Current meeting tools, to a great extent, have simplified and augmented the ways meetings are conducted by enabling participants to ``get things done'' and experience a comfortable physical environment. However, an important yet less explored element of these tools' design space is that of psychological safety -- the extent to which participants feel listened to, or motivated to be part of a meeting. We argue that an interdisciplinary approach would benefit the creation of new tools designed for retrofitting meetings for psychological safety. This approach comes with not only research opportunities -- ranging from sensing to modeling to user interface design -- but also challenges -- ranging from privacy to workplace surveillance.