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The Role of ICT in Office Work Breaks

Published: 07 May 2016 Publication History
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    Break activities -- deliberate and unexpected -- are common throughout the working day, playing an important role in the wellbeing of workers. This paper investigates the role of increasingly pervasive ICT in creating new opportunities for breaks at work, what impact the technology has on management of boundaries at work, and the effects these changes have on personal wellbeing. We present a study of the routines of office-workers, where we used images from participants' work-days to prompt and contextualize interviews with them. Analysis of coded photographs and interview data makes three contributions: an account of ubiquitous ICT creating new forms of micro-breaks, including the opportunity to employ previously wasted time; a description of the ways in which staff increasingly bring "home to work"; and a discussion of the emergence of "screen guilt". We evaluate our findings in relation to previous studies, and leave three research implications and questions for future work in this domain.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CHI '16: Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
      May 2016
      6108 pages
      ISBN:9781450333627
      DOI:10.1145/2858036
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      Published: 07 May 2016

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      Author Tags

      1. interruptions
      2. wearable camera
      3. wellbeing
      4. work breaks
      5. work-life boundaries
      6. workplace

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      • (2024)Bodywork at Work: Attending to Bodily Needs in Gig, Shift, and Knowledge WorkProceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642416(1-13)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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