Abstract
Workplace bias creates negative psychological outcomes for employees, permeating the larger organization. Workplace meetings are frequent, making them a key context where bias may occur. Video conferencing (VC) is an increasingly common medium for workplace meetings; we therefore investigated how VC tools contribute to increasing or reducing bias in meetings. Through a semi-structured interview study with 22 professionals, we found that VC features push meeting leaders to exercise control over various meeting parameters, giving leaders an outsized role in affecting bias. We demonstrate this with respect to four core VC features - -user tiles, raise hand, text-based chat, and meeting recording - -and recommend employing at least one of two mechanisms for mitigating bias in VC meetings - -1) transferring control from meeting leaders to technical systems or other attendees and 2) helping meeting leaders better exercise the control they do wield.
Original language | English (US) |
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Article number | 121 |
Journal | Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction |
Volume | 7 |
Issue number | CSCW1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Apr 16 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The work reported in this paper was supported by Cisco Research. We would also like to acknowledge and thank our participants for helping to make this work possible.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 ACM.
Keywords
- bias
- equity
- meetings
- organizations
- video conferencing
- workplace