The Atlantic: “Drink From Home: The Rise of the Remote-Work Holiday Party” (Mazmanian quoted)

December 15, 2016

After all, compulsory corporate fun, as draining as it sounds, exists to serve an organizational purpose. “My initial take on [virtual parties] is, yeah, they sound awkward and stilted,” says Melissa Mazmanian, an associate professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, who has researched ways to get geographically dispersed workers to collaborate more effectively. Mazmanian is interested in having remote workers “[see] each other as humans” instead of just chat-app icons or email addresses, and she says that “forcing yourself in the context of a group to do something different, speak in a way that’s different … even though they might seem silly, might possibly be really generative.”

Read the full story at The Atlantic.