Abstract
BACKGROUND
This paper investigates the pandemic remote work impacts and learning on onshore teams that support offshore activities. Wells construction and maintenance involve unpredictabilities, requiring support teams to help the crew onboard the rig to adapt the operations to the reality of the well. Ergonomics and Human Factors (E/HF) literature presented the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic remote work on knowledge workers’ health and well-being. Still, it lacked studies on the impacts on work activities of the industrial sector.
OBJECTIVE
Since safety knowledge is continuously and collectively developed in the experts’ day-to-day work activities, the research objective is to identify the impacts and learnings of remote work on the support teams’ safety knowledge management.
METHODS
The Ergonomic Work Analysis (EWA) guided the problem understanding, activities observations, and data analysis. The Work System Model (WSM) was the framework for systematizing data from 117 interviews.
RESULTS
The results indicate a significant reduction in interactions during the pandemic, making information and safety knowledge sharing more challenging and weakening team members’ cooperation. However, no impact on performance was reported. Working from home reduced interruptions and increased focus, facilitating individual tasks.
CONCLUSIONS
The research identifies collective and individual strategies developed by the team to cope with remote work. The findings confirm Management Literature findings on reducing interaction, hampering nonverbal communication, and increasing the amount of data. However, communication applications used during the pandemic have expanded rapidly, allowing faster access to team members, improving connectivity onshore/offshore, and making it a valuable legacy of the COVID-19 lockdown.
Introduction
By replacing collocated teams with virtual teams, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused transformations in numerous work systems, including some work activities that were not supposed to leave the office. Due to the lockdown imposed by the pandemic, real work activities were transformed, resulting in the workers using adaptive strategies to cope with real conditions and new contents with the available means of work [1]. COVID-19 lockdown has restricted mobility and transformed knowledge workers’ activities [2], prolonging and spreading the home office, with impacts on work systems worldwide not yet understood in its extent and particularities. Knowledge management practices implemented and maintained during the pandemic helped face the challenges of business outcomes in virtual work without face-to-face interaction [3]. This article focuses on the transformations resulting from the pandemic in the work activity of support teams. These specialized human resources are employed to respond to high-risk disruptive events and are present in several industries [4]. Through a case study, this paper investigates the pandemic’s impact on an Oil and Gas support team’s work activities and their strategies to cope with the changes that resulted from the shift from collocated to remote work. This study aims to identify what can be learned for the design of support team work systems in the future. Its relevance is to cover a gap in the HF/E literature, investigating the impact of the pandemic on an industrial support activity using Ergonomics tools and methods to provide reflections and recommendations to help workers adapt to a different scenario. The main contribution of this research to the HF/E area is the reflection on the limits of remote work for the experts’ activities, obtaining learnings for the experts’ work system design improvement, and contributing to other support groups and research in the field.
The Ergonomics and Human Factors (E/HF) pandemic-related literature has covered mainly first-line health work systems. According to Sigahi et al. [13], various research opportunities were left in different sectors to investigate work activities and provide recommendations, helping the workers adapt to the new scenario. Bentley et al. [14] reveal research areas in need of attention from Ergonomics and Human Factors (E/HF), including “collaboration and information sharing systems, design for virtual and network organizations,” “design of collaboration systems and virtual systems,” and “design of organizational and system resilience.” Salmon et al. [15] argue that HF/E has the tools and methods to work with complex systems that can be used to understand and respond to global threats such as the COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences. The authors highlight that such tools and methods can contribute to managing the tension between Economy and Health.
The Management literature, through methodologies and tools different from the E/HF field, presents relevant research on how the pandemic impacted work systems. Ipsen et al. [16] identify five advantages and disadvantages of working from home, including some directly related to work activity changes, such as greater work efficiency due to more focus and fewer interruptions. Cecchi et al. [17] reveal the remote work impact on New Process Development Teams, such as limited interactions and limited knowledge sharing, the difficulty of forging new work relationships online, and a lack of a hierarchy of urgency of information shared online. Waight et al. [18] present six implications of remote work in Brazil: loss of informality in communication, loss of contact with colleagues, loss of non-verbal communication, loss of tacit knowledge, workspace inequality, and gained time with family. Apte et al. [3] highlight effective KM practices supporting remote work during the pandemic, such as the widespread adoption of daily meetings.
Despite having the tools to understand the impacts of the pandemic on work systems other than health, the E/HF field lacks research on the topic. Other than the health sector, the E/HF literature has covered health and well-being aspects of remote work during the pandemic lockdown, such as ergonomic inadequacies of the working from home environment, home office consequences on visual and musculoskeletal systems, and research on measures for rapid deployment to the virtual environment ([15, 19–21]). A few articles investigate some aspects of the work activity itself. Goldenberg et al. [22] investigate organizational communication problems during the pandemic. Black et al. [23] suggest that working from home during the pandemic has often affected productivity positively. Doty et al. [24] show an increase in the frequency of videoconferencing during the pandemic and the need for shorter, fewer, and more engaging video meetings.
This study is focused on the research question: What are the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the support teams’ safety knowledge management? This question is investigated through a case study of an Oil and Gas expert support team that follows the drilling, maintenance, and abandonment of wells operations on the Brazilian southeast coast. The onshore support service is available 24/7, with five teams of 12 experts rotating in 12-hour shifts. The following sub-questions structure the research into phases:
Sub-question 1: How was the original work system in place characterized? Sub-question 2: What were the main changes in the experts’ work system caused directly by the pandemic? Sub-question 3: How did the team members’ dispersion and remote work affect the activity, the safety knowledge management, and the services? Sub-question 4: How were the company and team members able to reduce the impact of the loss of in-person interactions?
During the study, some assumptions were made. When the pandemic started, and considering the in-situ observations before it, remote work was expected to impact performance. However, after some months, it was clear that it was a mistaken assumption, and workers were adjusting to the new reality, apparently without significant impact on the service provided. If distance has impacted interactions, workers reported it allowed more focus on individual tasks, which justifies better performance. At this point, a new assumption arose. The reduction in interaction may have impaired some activities. A plausible assumption is that the remote work may have affected collective activities. Yet, this is challenging to prove. Experts’ collective activities depend on anticipating problems. If experts interact less, anticipation is not happening, and unless a disaster occurs, nobody will realize the problem could be anticipated and solved earlier.
Some concepts need to be established beforehand:
Virtual work will be considered a synonym for remote work and telework, emphasizing the difference between:
˚ A collocated team that works together in the same office environment. ˚ A virtual or remote team, where members are dispersed geographically and work together in a virtual environment. The two situations (collocated and virtual) result in different work dynamics, and that difference is precisely the focus of this article. A virtual team does not mean all participants are in the home office (working from home). Some can be at home, and others may work remotely, using different company offices. This paper’s concept of operational safety covers all aspects of offshore equipment and may involve failure, fire, explosions, leaks, and blowouts on events of varied magnitudes. Operational safety is different from occupational safety, which is related to accidents with personnel. In this context, safety knowledge is more than an object possessed by a person; it is a system of ongoing practices mediated by artefacts and continuously reproduced and negotiated [6]. Safety knowledge management cannot focus only on explicit knowledge but also relies on “supporting knowledge sharing, building networks, enabling knowledge translation, and analyzing knowledge processes [12].
Supported by the Ergonomic Work Analysis (EWA), this paper investigates the impacts on the expert’s activity and how their real work has been transformed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Identifying these impacts should reinforce the need for safety knowledge management practices, especially the knowledge acquired by work experience and shared by experts in their workplace.
The results of this paper should interest all sectors demanding safety support for work activities in complex and singular environments and governmental institutions that need to be prepared for disruptive threats response.
This paper is structured in six sections. The first section introduces the problem and the literature. The second sets the case, and the third establishes the methodology. The fourth section presents the results, and the fifth articulates the findings with the literature. The sixth section discusses the conclusions, indicating the implications and limitations of the study.
Support teams
Safety-critical industries involving complex activities and harmful environments use specialized teams to handle anomalies, assisting in solving difficult problems and supporting high-severity situation responses [4]. In complex work systems, safety requires avoiding harmful incidents and adapting and maintaining the work processes within acceptable risk margins [5]. Recruiting expert personnel allows the creation of high-performance support teams prepared to develop adaptive solutions under unexpected situations. For Cook and Long [4], the “iterative and empirically based creation and modification of a method to make” qualifies the activity of support teams as an expression of resilience and requires resources and attention to develop individuals’ expertise continuously [4].
Safe operations are the result of a collective process in quotidian work practices. The knowledge that supports safer work processes is rooted in the day-to-day practice of experienced professionals. Safety expertise is an ongoing collaborative construction that combines different work activity elements: “competencies, materials, relations, communications, people” [6]. The experts’ safety knowledge is not a consolidated construction but a continuous and collective process. In complex activities, encouraging the sharing of different perspectives in decision-making helps deal with uncertainty and explore different scenarios to converge to solutions collectively [7]. Knowledge learned from experience in a company is a combination of tacit and explicit. The sharing of the tacit component involves not only the piece of knowledge itself but also insights into how to deal with ongoing situations that are more easily shared face-to-face [8].
In the oil and gas industry, reflections on the Macondo Deep Water Horizon blowout in 2010 resulted in the creation of expert teams to support drilling rig operations. These teams, formed by experts from different disciplines, work onshore, interacting with the team on board the rigs and confronting operational and safety perspectives to make drilling operations safer. Exploring Oil and Gas offshore fields involves complex and singular operations in a high-hazard context. Building wells requires dealing with the unpredictable deep-water reality, being open to constant changes, and adapting the prescribed design to the singularity of each well’s characteristics. Expert teams have a dedicated workplace equipped with integrated operations ICT tools. Face-to-face interactions facilitate the construction of a trustful environment where discussing and confronting ideas freely is possible. Experts have relative autonomy, allowing them to promptly respond to the rigs’ demands. Team members combine information to build a shared understanding of the operations going on offshore [9]. When facing an unexpected event, the workgroup needs to quickly get together in a teleconference with the operation team and discuss the procedures in place to achieve a collective design change for the well in execution. Disruptive episodes are frequent and require team members to share their adaptive capacity to create new ways to build wells collectively [10].
A singular, complex, and disruptive event that began in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic challenged work activities worldwide when lockdown restrictions were imposed to control virus transmission. The Brazilian Oil and Gas support teams had their internal interactions changed suddenly from face-to-face to virtual, requiring new strategies to perform their tasks. Remote work is nothing new for this industry since, for almost two decades, onshore teams have worked remotely and collaboratively with offshore teams in Integrated Operations (IO). Moltu [11] reports “an expanding global collaboration across geographical and temporal (time) zones in addition to an integrated collaboration across disciplines within the OPS-rooms based on real-time data.” However, the support teams have faced an unexpected transformation of their work activities in the new reality of the pandemic. Dispersed geographically, they need to interact virtually with their teammates. How were the experts’ activities affected? How have safety expert teams adapted to the pandemic? Is it possible to help these teams to deal with the work transformations? What can be learned from this experience?
Through the lenses of Ergonomic Work Analysis, this article investigates the work activity transformations of a support team of experts resulting from remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Case setting
The operations support service is performed by five teams of twelve experts rotating in 12-hour shifts for six days, providing an onshore support service available 24/7 for the drilling rig operations on the Brazilian coast. The experts’ services aim to achieve safer and more effective operations. The expert’s team, together with an operations supervisor, supports around 20 rigs on the Brazilian coast (Figs. 1 and 2). Offshore, the wells’ operations are performed by a rig team led by the company man, the primary customer of expert support services. The operations coordinator works onshore and is responsible for the offshore operations of around three rigs simultaneously. Each group of two operations coordinators is supported by an operations supervisor who, together with the experts’ team, works 24/7 on a shift regime. Experts work not only by demand when contacted to follow and advise on more complex events but also by analyzing, commenting, and approving each operation sequence that details the work that will be carried out by the rig’s team onboard. The experts check if the operations follow the company safety procedures and support the adjustment of operational sequences to the singularity of each well. The well design has an individualized outline based on geological studies and simulations that must be adapted to the situations revealed by the day-to-day work activity. Time constraints are directly related to financial constraints. The rig’s daily rate of around US$ 500K makes any operation interruption too costly. In episodes of greater criticality, the operational and support teams work together, managing risks and adapting the operation to the context and singularity of the well to ensure better performance and reduce interruptions without compromising safety.
Experts’ organization chart.
Experts’ main interactions.
The investigation of the COVID-19 pandemic impacts on support teams was developed through an exploratory case study, combining two qualitative tools: the Ergonomic Work Analysis (EWA) methodology [1] and the Work System Model (WSM) framework [25]. The results obtained from the EWA in the case study were systematized using the WSM [25] as an analytical framework, which allowed to present the context, detailing the original work system, and showing the changes along the timeline (Fig. 3).
Methodology diagram.
The EWA approach [1] guided the planning and observations of the work activities of around 60 workers before and during the pandemic. The observations are the keystone of the EWA methodology, rather than interviews or questionnaires, “going beyond a superficial representation” [1]. EWA activity observations aim to understand the work activity and its variabilities, requiring a long observation period to build the intervention from the point of view of the work [1]. The prescribed task executed in expected conditions is supposed to achieve the planned results. Real work activity performed under real conditions is subject to variabilities that require the workers to make adjustments through their personal ways of working to ensure the results are achieved as planned. EWA activity observations allow for understanding the personal ways in which each worker responds to variations in work conditions and content to obtain results from the available means of work. Substituting collocated work for remote work results in strategies that are necessary for the workers to adapt to new conditions or contents to achieve effective results. Understanding the work activity requires considering workers’ validations, which, however, are not obvious. Workers tend to describe their work according to what they consider essential in the conversation, eventually omitting important details that they consider secondary [1]. Furthermore, the worker’s experience, due to its tacit quality, is not always easily expressed verbally. It is the continuity of an interactive validation process, based on the concrete work activity, that allows the understanding of the work to be expanded.
The EWA phases are presented in Fig. 4. The first phase is constructing the demand by examining the request, making an initial diagnosis, and defining the objectives. The second phase involves understanding how the company operates and the population’s characteristics. In the third phase, prescribed tasks and processes are identified and understood. In the fourth phase, activity observations and verbalizations allow for investigating how the results are obtained and the means of work used, which is difficult to understand only through interviews with workers. The results from observations are submitted to the workers for validation in all phases. Presenting the workers with the researchers’ understanding from observations allows them to reflect and sometimes face an unconscious or non-exposed aspect. The resulting comments are called verbalizations. At this point, it is possible to adjust the diagnosis, elaborate, and propose an intervention plan considering the detailed observation results, the fifth and last phase of the EWA.
EWA phases for the project based on Guérin et al. (2007).
Work systems are compounded by work (human, machine, or both), information, technology, and other resources to produce products or services for a customer. Several coordinated work systems form a typical organization. The WSM is represented by Alter [25] as a graphical framework with nine elements characterizing its scope and operation. Participants, information, technologies, and work practices are the core that perform the work. The other five elements are products and services, customers, environment, infrastructure, and strategies. Together, the nine elements outline the work system, allowing the identification of changes, risks, opportunities, and needs (Fig. 5).
Work System Framework as defined by Alter (2006).
Using the WSM as an E/HF research tool makes it possible to identify which elements impact human work activity, helping to design changes for improvement. Information and knowledge sharing are present in Alter’s WSM [25] as an aspect of work practices in its different levels of integration. The first level is a common culture that facilitates communication. The second level is the company’s procedures that structure work processes and technologies. The third level is information and knowledge sharing that supports individual results. Coordination is the fourth level and requires negotiation and a more intense flow of information to favor the results. The fifth level of integration is collaboration, where the work activities are more interdependent and performed collectively.
The first, second, and third phases of the EWA research were performed in situ before the pandemic between September and December 2019. The fourth phase, in situ activity observations, started in January 2020 but was interrupted by the lockdown in March 2020. Researchers seized the opportunity to follow the remote activities with online observations, making a comparison with the activities observed in situ. Online observations started in May 2020.
The dotted lines in Fig. 4 show how the EWA was adapted for the case study.
In March 2020, Brazil recognized COVID-19 as a pandemic, and the lockdown began in many cities in the subsequent weeks. Following the requirements of social distancing, the company decided that experts with comorbidities should work from home. However, considering that at this point, it was unclear how remote work would impact experts’ activities without face-to-face communication, the home office was not allowed for all. Experts could work from offices in the towns near their homes or remain in the original office. The social distancing measures also changed the research course of action, not allowing the ergonomists to keep up with the in-situ observations of the real work activities, as established by the EWA methodology [26]. The continuity of the case study was made possible with online activity observations, allowing the researchers to follow the transformations caused by the pandemic in the experts’ work activities. Firstly, there were two rounds of online semi-structured interviews to identify the transformations in their activities. Then, the researcher attended online experts’ internal meetings in the following months to observe their interactions. In the second year of the pandemic, it was possible to organize talks with the five teams of experts, discussing the pros and cons of collocated and remote work and identifying their concerns regarding returning to the office. Though online interaction limits the observation, it was a feasible alternative considering the COVID-19 pandemic. At this point, researchers had already built a relationship with the experts’ team and their leadership. Participating in experts’ online meetings with the teams provided an alternative way of observation, complementing the online interviews with the experts.
Research design
The research design follows the six steps of the case study methodology established by Yin [27]: plan, project, preparation, data collection, data analysis, and reporting.
Plan
This paper documents an exploratory investigation of a contemporary phenomenon, and the research is built on a single case study. It is exploratory because there is little research on the topic, and contemporary because it is a current complex organizational phenomenon. Building the research on a single case study is justified because the work activity of support teams is within a complex environment, is highly contextual, and demands in-depth evidence. The case study does not address variations in size and nature. Risks and costs associated with offshore ultra-deep drilling operations justify investigating work activities in a real-life context in searching for sustainable organizational changes for performance and well-being improvements (Goals 9 and 3, [28]).
The unit of analysis is the work activity of expert support teams concerning safety knowledge management from a Brazilian Oil and Gas company. The case context involved a period before the COVID-19 pandemic (September 2019 to March 2020), during (May 2020 to December 2021), and after (January 2022 to July 2022). The sample of workers considered for interviews and observation was defined by opportunity. Researchers were developing another project at the oil and gas company when interrupted by the pandemic, which created the opportunity to investigate the support team’s remote work. As detailed in the subsection 4.2.4, more than 90% of the team of experts were interviewed in person and online (Table 1 - Data collection).
Data collection.
Data collection.
The discussion of the case study established by the main research question is developed in five stages, following the research sub-questions:
Stage 1: How was the original work system in place characterized? Stage 2: What were the main changes in the experts’ work system caused directly by the pandemic? Stage 3: How did the team members’ dispersion and remote work affect the activity, the safety knowledge management, and the services? Stage 4: How were the company and team members able to reduce the impact of the loss of in-person interactions?
Preparation
The researchers applied the EWA principles between September 2019 and March 2020, collecting data on prescribed activities and the population, observing work activities, and performing face-to-face interviews. The partial results were presented to the workers and leadership for validation.
During the first year of the pandemic, the main research activities were two online rounds of semi-structured interviews with the experts and online observation of their internal meetings. The results from the first interviews and observations served to plan a new round of interviews, validating and complementing the results. The continuity of the research made it possible to develop a longitudinal case study, with data collected before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Data collection
The sources of evidence considered were documents provided by the Company, direct observation (in-situ and online), and semi-structured interviews (face-to-face and online). It also included constantly validating the researcher’s understanding with the workers to complement and confirm the data interpretation. The data was collected between September 2019 and July 2022, as detailed in Table 1.
The in-situ observations were conducted between September 2019 and March 2020 as part of a research to build recommendations for new support centers. The researcher’s observations aimed to understand the experts’ work activities and interactions. The EWA oriented the observation towards the real work activity, considering the content of the expert’s work activity: the work processes, the communications, the information, and knowledge consulted and transformed, the coordination and collaboration involved. Face-to-face interviews were also performed, allowing the experts to express their points of view about their activities. The data was collected in the form of notes and transferred to spreadsheets that were the object of reports and presentations to validate its content. The results of in-situ observations and interviews allowed the characterization of the original work system, systematized and organized through the WSM framework.
Online semi-structured interviews were performed during the pandemic to identify the changes in the work activity. Open questions were proposed to guide the interviews based on what was already known from document analysis, in-situ activity observations, and interviews performed before the pandemic. The experts were free to answer in their own way, changing the subject if preferred. The interviews were done online through the communications app and documented in notes. The researcher always had the camera open, but the interviewee was free to have the camera off if preferred, which was very frequent. The interviewees spoke about adjusting to the new work environment and the challenges of their work activities in the new setting.
The first round of semi-structured interviews was based on the following questions:
How is access to systems, programs, and websites? Was there an impact on physical resources (videowall, screens, notebook/desktop, landline/cell phone)? Was there an impact on the interaction with the experts’ team members? Was there an impact on the team’s update on the progress of operations? Was there an impact on external communication (manager, pre-boarding personnel, rigs’ operational teams on board, operational teams onshore, and sectors under administrative regime)?
The second round of semi-structured interviews was based on the following questions:
What are the difficulties for those who are teleworking or for those who are working with someone who is teleworking? Is there any difficulty in consulting the data necessary for the activity (schedule, well design, and others)? In case of difficulty, is the solution to consult the systems or people?
The talks with the five teams of experts included presenting a layout study for the return to collocated work, reducing room occupancy by half to ensure the necessary social distancing. The talks were based on the following questions:
What face-to-face work characteristics must be recovered upon returning to the office? What telework or home office characteristics can be lost on return?
Inferences and validations were performed through meetings with the supervisor, interviews with the experts and the leader, and team talks. Gradually and continuously, the partial results were presented and discussed with them.
Since the in-situ EWA observations before the pandemic allowed a clear picture of the original expert’s team work activities, it was possible to identify the transformations caused by the pandemic, even without being face-to-face with the experts.
Data analysis and reporting
This longitudinal qualitative exploratory investigation was performed on the data collection before, during, and after the pandemic through the theoretical lenses of EWA and WSM. The different types of collected data allow triangulation, increasing the case study validity [29]. The EWA approach provided data about work activity through documents, observations, interviews, and team talks. The EWA qualitative results were then systematized through the WSM framework. Reports of the EWA data collection and analysis were periodically presented to the experts and their managers, allowing verbalizations and validation along the process.
The data from the in-situ observations and interviews allowed the characterization of the original experts’ work system before the pandemic, answering sub-questions 1 (How was the original work system in place characterized?) and 2 (What were the main changes in the experts’ work system caused directly by the pandemic?). Sub-question 3 (How did the team members’ dispersion and remote work affect the activity, the safety knowledge management, and the services?) and Sub-question 4 (How were the company and team members able to reduce the impact of the loss of in-person interactions?) were answered through the analysis of the data collected during the pandemic.
The excellent adhesion to the two rounds of semi-structured interviews (as presented in Table 1) allowed an in-depth understanding of the pandemic impacts. The data analysis followed a general inductive approach with codes obtained from the raw data and interview notes subsequently read by the researcher [30], aiming to answer the research questions related to the positive and negative impacts of the geographical dispersion of the team during the pandemic and the new strategies used to adapt the work system to the new scenario. The inductive approach aims to interpret and summarize raw data, identifying links between the findings and the research objectives [30].
The interview comprised open questions about the impacts (negative and positive) on the experts’ work activities resulting from the pandemic and remote work and how they cope with them (strategies adopted). The interviews’ analysis included the following steps:
(1) Organizing all interview notes into a single spreadsheet. (2) Consecutive readings of the interviews, highlighting the quotations connected to sub-questions 3 (the impacts of pandemic remote work) and 4 (the strategies to cope with the loss of in-person interactions). (3) Creating codes emerged from the quotations. (4) Identifying the categories derived from the codes after multiple readings, grouping them by similarity. (5) Identifying themes, grouping categories, and connecting them to research objectives. (6) Reviewing the process to check the consistency of the coding process.
Though the WSM was not utilized in coding, when analyzing the results, it was observed that the emerged themes made it possible to identify whether the elements of the WSM were impacted negatively or positively.
Item (1) was performed in Excel. Items (2) to (4) were performed in Atlas.ti software, which was particularly helpful considering the size of the sample (around 60 workers) and the great amount of data after two consecutive rounds of online interviews.
The Reporting Step is presented in this article.
Results
This section presents the results guided by the main research question: What were the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the support teams’ safety knowledge management? The structure of the results section follows the sub-questions 1 to 4 defined in section 1.
How was the original work system in place characterized?
The initial in-situ observations allowed an understanding of each element of the original experts’ work system and identified some particularities of the team of experts. The Company has specialized sectors for each discipline involved in the execution and maintenance of wells. The multidisciplinary team of experts is formed by elements of different sectors in the company and with different managers. Different procedures apply to each specialty. The following characterization of the service uses Alter’s WSM framework [25] and is summarized in Fig. 6.
Experts’ work system before the pandemic.
STRATEGY: The company is expanding outsourced services and focusing on maritime wells. Offshore activity is under strict environmental and safety regulations, and incidents must be reported immediately due to the hazardous environment and the risk of major accidents. Since its creation, the company strategy concerning the experts’ team has gradually moved the team members to the same shared workplace. Face-to-face interaction has always been considered a facilitator of the experts’ support activity in the company. Due to the significant number of simultaneous operations on wells, the company could adopt a centralized acquisition of services in big contracts. Unified contracts on each discipline supplying services for many rigs allow the company to reduce costs. It follows that, for better use of the contracted resources, operational details such as the vessel to be used or equipment specifics cannot be defined in advance. For that reason, different from what happens in similar companies worldwide, the detailed project is not completed in advance but just before the operation, and the team of experts actively participates.
PARTICIPANTS: The participants are five teams of approximately 12 experts from different specialties related to building and maintaining wells that rotate in 12-hour shifts to provide a 24/7 support service for offshore operations. The employees join the company after passing a competitive public examination and usually make a career there. According to data collected in 2019, most experts are men, and around 60% are between 31 to 40 years old. About 80% have a bachelor’s degree, and half have a graduate course. About 90% have been in the company for over six years and have offshore experience. Experts stay in the position for no more than three years when another member of the specialized sector assumes. The possibility of being legally liable for errors that cause significant damage is inherent to the service and is also a reason for caution in their interactions. It took a long time for the ergonomists to develop the necessary trust until the experts could speak more clearly in the interviews. Observations of the activities revealed that experts rely on careful communication to ensure the confidentiality of operations.
INFRASTRUCTURE: The building complex where the original experts’ room is situated has an intranet, internet, air conditioning, power, and a generator. There are bathrooms, a shared kitchen, and space for meals near the office. Besides the technical and informational infrastructure, the complex also counts on human infrastructure for technology and building maintenance.
ENVIRONMENT: Work Systems (WS) that are part of the expert’s environment are the sectors WS for each specialty, the onshore operational WS, and the offshore operational WS. The last one is the customers’ WS, composed of the company’s and contractors’ technicians. As a result, the environment comprises logic other than the safety logic from the experts. Operational teams onshore and offshore share an operational logic based on performance. The different logics require constant negotiation between teams. Since the performance logic is more powerful and the experts are fewer, the expert leader must constantly work on team building and shared goals to maintain team cohesion. There are specialized sectors for the different disciplines, such as Fluids and Perforation, which means that each expert has a manager from his specialty who is constantly in contact with him to be updated and give support. The need for confidentiality pervades the experts’ environment, not only because of the industrial secrecy that protects the new field discoveries and innovations but also because of the silence around safety problems used by the teams to protect from being considered responsible for safety and operational failures. Confidentiality and silence are barriers to information and knowledge sharing; experts must use negotiation skills to avoid them.
INFORMATION: The primary information materials required by the experts’ activities are intermediary knowledge artifacts focused on safety, ranging from general and prescriptive to more particular and singular materials. Procedures, contracts, manuals, guarantee requirements, and Oil and Gas regulations are all very prescriptive artifacts not adjusted to the singularity of each well. The reality of each maritime well is beyond reach: it is inferred by the work team through their personal experience. Artifacts closer to the reality of each well are change requests and risk analysis, collective and synchronized situation awareness, knowledge, experience, inferences, and adaptive capacity shared by the experts.
ICT & Non-ICT TECHNOLOGIES: The expert’s activity depends highly on information systems. It involves enormous databases such as Wells and Rigs’ History Database, Operational Diaries’, and Lessons Learned Database. It also involves Real Data monitoring Systems and Simulations, Weather forecast applications and websites, and spreadsheet models developed by the team, among others. Technologies also include physical ICT resources. Each expert has a console with space for three screens, a landline phone with a teleconference function, a mobile phone, a desktop, a notebook, and a chair appropriate for 12 work hours. Their dedicated room has a video wall and whiteboards for notices andsketches.
PROCESSES AND ACTIVITIES: The experts’ team have a sort of different types of activities:
PRODUCTS AND SERVICES: The support provided by the experts aims firstly at safer operations and, secondly, at more efficient operations. It ranges from individual expert advice, analysis, commenting, and approval of operational sequences to collective decision support on disruptive events.
CUSTOMERS: The final customer of the experts is the Company man, who is in charge of the rig and the onboard team. The experts cannot interfere directly in the decisions of the Company man. Experts’ work in supervising operational safety is consultive and requires negotiating skills. Though experts are responsible for approving hold points to ensure safety procedures are followed, the Company man has the final word on how the operation will proceed.
When the lockdown was imposed in March 2020, the Company had to adopt emergency measures:
The team of experts was dispersed geographically, reducing travel, allowing the experts to work remotely from other offices of the Company near their hometown, and reducing the number of experts working in the original office. Workers with comorbidities (or with a household with comorbidities) were allowed to work from home. The shift regime was changed to reduce weekly trips. Instead of 6 working days, they started to work 12 days, followed by 18 days off, like the teams working on board. The company implemented significant ICT improvements, especially to their virtual network, to make home office and remote work viable. The communications app acquired by the Company in the previous year has had little usage till then. During the pandemic, it became the main communication channel internally in the team and externally with the Company and stakeholders. In the rigs, the Company man now has access to the communications app, making him closer to the onshore teams.
These emergency measures immediately changed three WSM framework elements: strategies, infrastructure, and technologies, as shown in Fig. 7. In the second year of the pandemic (Fig. 8), a new change in strategy allowed all the workers to adopt the home office based on domestic infrastructure. In 2022 (Fig. 9), with the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company decided the experts’ team should return to the office. At this point, most of the workers in the company were already working in hybrid mode.
Experts’ work system in the first year of the pandemic.
Experts’ work system in the second year of the pandemic.
Experts’ work system in the return to the office after the pandemic.
How these changes affected the work activities and services is still being determined. These impacts were identified through interviews performed in 2020, as explained in subsection 4.2.5. The isolation imposed by the pandemic dispersed the experts’ team, changing the interactions among them. To cope with the distance, the experts had to develop new strategies, such as daily meetings and constant chats on the communications app, which turned out to be successful learnings from the pandemic in improving expert interaction.
Table 2 summarizes the results of the inductive analysis applied to the online interview notes (raw data). The two rounds of interviews (totaling 112) allowed a deep understanding of the negative and positive effects of remote work during the pandemic and revealed the strategies adopted by the experts to cope with the activity transformations. Table 2 shows the codes, categories, and themes, and the last column connects the results with the WSM.
Coding results.
Coding results.
The main negative impacts on work processes were related to integration difficulties (codes (1) to (13) in Table 2). In remote work, the experts interact less than in collocated work. The team leader is more isolated, requiring an additional effort to coordinate the team remotely. Without regular face-to-face interaction, team cohesion is weakened. People miss the team together with face-to-face interaction. There were difficulties related to information access. Information transfer found barriers in systems (“it is difficult to track information on the communications app”). Isolated, the experts cannot hear their colleagues, and it is more difficult to inform and be informed.
The inductive analysis also identified negative impacts related to difficulties adapting to the virtual environment (codes (14) to (17) in Table 2). The significant number of chat groups and meetings were time-consuming and required an adaptation effort from the experts.
It was expected to find negative impacts on the services provided. However, this was not confirmed by the results. Instead, positive impacts on the services provided were identified (codes (24) to (27) in Table 2), resulting in customer satisfaction. Firstly, the possibility to give fast answers to the Company man, the customer. It is easier to focus on individual work without interruptions and develop individual activities faster when working isolated, especially for workers without family members at home. The isolation also allowed more readiness. Since the experts can stay connected for more hours in remote work, the responses to customer demands are faster than in collocated work, where they need time to commute and leave the office for meals.
The positive impact on work processes was the ease of adapting to virtual (codes (18) to (23) in Tabel 2). The systems involved in remote work performed well, and the adaptation was relatively fast. The company had acquired the communication app in the previous year. Still, workers only started using it at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when it was considered the best option to allow remote work communication. The old connections with colleagues rooted in the past collocated activities were helpful to work at a distance. The online meetings, where you can join without leaving your workstations and attending more than one meeting at a time, were seen as positive by the experts despite the increased workload.
As presented in Table 2, the strategies identified to adapt to remote work were separated into collective (codes (28) to (31)) and individual strategies (codes (32) to (42)).
The primary collective efforts were the chat group for team members (code (28)), where each can post updated information, and the daily alignment meeting (code (29)) at the beginning of the shift to build a collective understanding of the ongoing operations. Both strategies were successful and were maintained when the team returned to collocated work. On the starting day of each new shift, longer meetings (code (31)) were held, allowing them to detail and discuss the ongoing operations. There were also discussion groups on the communications app chat (code (30)) to examine events that require more attention.
Among the individual efforts, the leader had to work as an agent stimulating interaction among team members (code (32)). The experts had to look for info by interacting with people: calling, asking, provoking, and talking more to people on board to have news (codes (28) to (31)). To establish priorities among the great amount of data, the experts started using calls when the matter was urgent and chat to start non-urgent interactions (codes (36) to (37)). Looking more carefully for information on systems was another strategy adopted by the experts, requiring them to be more attentive to monitoring, reading reports, and taking time to read chat history (codes (38) and (40)). Last, the activity of sharing info with the expert from the next shift (the back), required a more detailed report. It was also necessary to include the back in new chats giving them access to chat history information (codes (41) to (42)).
Those strategies have proven effective since the experts maintained normal activities and good results. However, the experts still miss the collocated work and face-to-face interaction, which cannot be substituted in the virtual environment.
Discussion
The main impact of remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic was on the experts’ interactions within the team, making information and safety knowledge sharing more challenging and weakening team members’ cooperation and knowledge combination. Though not proven, negative impacts on collective work activities and teams’ performance were expected.
Though the research revealed limitations of remote work for the expert’s activity, it confirmed that, when necessary, it is possible to adopt telework. However, the richness of face-to-face interactions can make a difference in building a shared vision of more complex events happening at the rig.
The main contribution of this research to the HF/E area is the reflection on the limits of remote work for the experts’ activities, which provided learnings for improving the design of the experts’ team and contributing to other support groups and research in the field. The study shows the possibilities of the E/HF field to investigate variabilities in work activities and provide recommendations, helping the workers adapt to work transformations.
This section discusses the impacts on work activities and services determined through the EWA and WSM analysis, identifies the learnings from the remote work experience, and indicates research contributions and gaps.
The impacts
According to the results, the main impact of dispersion and remote work during the pandemic on work activities was related to interactions within the team. Remote interactions were less spontaneous and required more intentionality, confirming the findings from Waight et al. [18] about the loss of informality in communication. The loss of contact with colleagues discouraged interaction and weakened interpersonal bonds. Consequently, it made the interactions with new team members more difficult, confirming the findings from Cecchi et al. [17] concerning the difficulties of forging new work relationships remotely. The trust rooted in the conviviality and the friendship developed among team members in the collocated work helped the transition to remote work and reduced the impact on experts’ performance [10]. However, team components changed as the pandemic dragged on, weakening experts’ relationships. The experts were missing the presence of their colleagues, the talks in the corridor, having a coffee or in the smoking space, opportunities of networking that they reported as a time to discuss informally, generating new ideas for problems they were facing in their work activities, what Dixon [31] calls the hallways of leaning. Skarholt et al. [32] highlight that trust affects communication, conflict management, negotiation, knowledge sharing, and commitment. It is a critical factor in motivating contribution, combination, and coordination of resources to build collective solutions. Remote work should require periodic in-person meetings with the whole team [8], which, unfortunately, was impossible during the pandemic. However, physical presence remains an important factor for communication and integration, and if remote work is needed, periodical in-person meetings with the whole team should improve trust and facilitate knowledge transfer ([3, 8]). Communication difficulties affect the sharing of explicit and, possibly, tacit knowledge, as in Cecchi et al. [17]. The explicit is generally available through virtual intermediary objects such as the company’s procedures, tools’ manuals, and terms of the guarantee and reports. The loss of tacit knowledge was not directly confirmed, as by Waight et al. [18]. Still, it is expected that the impact on communication, integration, and information processing has indirectly affected tacit knowledge, which is more challenging to communicate. Expertise is rooted in experts’ experience [6], meaning it has a significant component of tacit knowledge. Its sharing involves not only the knowledge itself but also insights into how to deal with ongoing situations [8]. Losses in information and knowledge sharing may have affected the collective, synchronous, non-routine tasks that require shared and synchronized situation awareness and the combination of different expert knowledge and experience to create solutions [32].
The reduction in interactions identified in the remote work seems to have been aggravated by four original characteristics of the team that were observed in the collocated work:
Their environment involves a logic other than safety, requiring an effort to maintain team cohesion around the team’s objectives. Confidentiality and silence are barriers to sharing information and knowledge that require trust and are more easily overcome in face-to-face interaction. Team members are under different managers, challenging their integration and interaction. Experts need to share collective and synchronized situation awareness and combine expert knowledge and experience to create solutions.
In remote work, these four characteristics require them to seek new interaction strategies to maintain the necessary information and safety knowledge sharing.
Remote work was particularly effective during the pandemic for the expert’s asynchronous work activities, which may explain the good performance in the period and the resulting customer satisfaction. Despite the difficulties in information sharing, expert advice, follow-up of operational tests, analysis, and approval of operational sequences, were positively impacted because, in isolation, the experts reported having more focus and fewer interruptions. The isolation also allowed more readiness since, working from home in isolation, specialists had more hours available online without travelling for meals or home. As a result, it was easier and faster for the customer to contact them, though the improved readiness in the home office may also be the reason for the increased workload.
A significant change in information impacted work activities. The new communication app made remote work possible. Still, it resulted in a great amount of data from chats, which are safety intermediary objects continuously reinterpreted and reused by the team of experts [6]. The shared images and videos allowed by the communication app resulted in rich and well-contextualized information, but it takes much work to track it. The new communication app also positively impacted the services by making communication between experts and the Company man (the client) faster and easier, leading to customer satisfaction.
Collective and synchronous tasks, however, had to find new strategies to avoid the harmful effects of distance on knowledge sharing, coordination, and collaboration. The impacts on collective tasks were not directly shown in the results but may have happened considering other aspects such as fewer interactions, less exchange of information, and less integration. Each well is singular and requires adaptation of procedures and tasks followed closely by the experts, each with a different expertise. Episodes other than the ones considered in the standard procedures are frequent and need team members to share adaptive capacity, collectively creating new ways to build wells [4]. Negative impacts on services were expected because of the reduced integration that may have harmed anticipation of non-routine events, though the Results did not confirm this. The anticipation failure of a non-routine event is hard to identify and observe. Anticipation is essential for the experts to provide fast responses without delaying or interrupting operations offshore and maintaining acceptable risk margins [5]. Interview data analysis did not reveal an increase in harmful events or a negative effect on service performance. On the contrary, the results suggest that working from home positively affected service performance, as stated by Black et al. [23]. If asynchronous tasks can benefit from isolation, this is different for synchronous tasks. Information or knowledge not shared by the experts could have made it impossible to anticipate a problem they could solve. The findings identify that experts feel they miss anticipation opportunities, but the concrete situations and negative results on services still need to be found. Even with superior performance on individual tasks, less integration should harm overall performance, especially considering the complexity of their collective work. Codes such as “easier to forget or be forgotten“ or “difficult to inform and be informed” suggest that team members operating isolated and with reduced involvement may result in decisions being made by fewer participants with only a few opinions considered. “People may lack important skills or expertise that others might have brought” [25], and with fewer people involved, discussions and decisions might lack expertise from the missing components.
The learning and the design recommendations
The strategies adopted to cope with the distance revealed by the Results were all related to work activities, and some suggest remote work limitations.
The communication app made remote work viable and helped improve connectivity and knowledge sharing. It is a collaboration platform that combines chat, video conferencing, file storage, and integration with some editing software.
The results revealed collective practices that were particularly effective during the pandemic: Chat group for team members, daily alignment online meeting at the beginning of the shift, and discussion groups by chat for new events. Many teams around the world adopted regular online meetings on COVID-19 remote work to improve knowledge sharing ([3, 17]). The experts learned from remote work experience that daily meetings are efficient for information sharing and team integration. After the return to collocated work, the online meetings were maintained.
There were also individual practices adopted in remote work and considered effective by the experts. Isolated, they found new ways to be informed: asking online, reading reports, and being more attentive to monitoring parameters and chat history. Chats have proven useful, though the significant number of chat groups makes the task very hard, with a challenging to establish a hierarchy of urgency [17].
The lack of residential infrastructure and the presence of households during the lockdown made using webcams difficult during the pandemic. The calls without video and the resulting intense use of chats hamper non-verbal communication, which is particularly important among Brazilian people [18]. Cecchi et al. [17] suggested using ICT tools to support knowledge sharing and minimize communication difficulties despite not substituting face-to-face interaction. Aware of the impact of not having face-to-face interaction, the experts’ leader had to find other strategies for more effective communication.
The pandemic’s remote work revealed negative impacts of communication app use. The excessive number of chats and meetings and the possibility of simultaneously attending multiple meetings may have resulted in the loss of focus on their primary tasks as operations support. It may also have reduced the experts’ costly and scarce availability.
After the pandemic, experts still use the communication app as the primary communication tool for chats, calls, and online meetings. Though the return to the office was a return to face-to-face interaction within the team, part of the interactions in the collocated work now use chat. It is a path with no return. With chats instead of voice, this also means that the experts are not hearing some of the colleagues’ interactions. It is suitable for reducing noise and interruptions, but some intentionality is needed from the experts to choose voice when information sharing is essential.
Consolidating the communications app as the primary technology for communication facilitated contact with the client, the Company man on board. With the experts closer to the offshore client work system, building a collective and synchronized situation awareness was easier, making it easier to meet clients’ expectations. The increase in operations performed remotely soon may accelerate new improvements to the rig’s internet infrastructure, making it possible for the whole team on board to use theapp.
Some learnings from the pandemic experience have proven useful even for the collocated work, improving the experts’ WSM and service performance. Although important, other learnings were not fully implemented, and it is necessary to investigate why. Considering that, it is possible to establish some design recommendations to improve the experts’ service:
Meeting regularly online (code (29) in Table 2). The habit acquired during the pandemic has proven to help keep the whole team informed, and it is also an opportunity for external participants to join. Using the communication app (codes (28) to (30), (36), (37) and (41) in Table 2). The tool has proven better than telephone and emails, allowing fast access to internal and external people, including the client, the Company Man onboard. Maintaining the monthly internal meeting online where experts share knowledge from their specialties and encouraging the discussion and exchange of experience between the different disciplines as a response to integration difficulties (codes (1) to (7), and code (9) in Table 2). Establishing boundaries for online meetings, as a response to code (15) in Table 2. Though it is easy to participate, online sessions can quickly reduce the time for the experts’ primary tasks, impacting performance and resulting in prolonged working hours. Defining presets for chat groups, ensuring all five experts of each specialty are included (code (41) in Table 2) and avoiding the knowledge being confined to one person only (code (42) in Table 2). Developing a knowledge process, in response to codes (11) and (14) in Table 2, to select and treat data from the communication app chat history to avoid losing helpful information and knowledge from that channel. Stimulating the use of webcams in meetings for more effective verbal and non-verbal communication as a response to interaction difficulties (codes (1) to (7), and code (9)), and following Cecchi et al. [17]. Implementing collaboration rooms to be connected with the rigs, with connection provided by ICT tools, starting with war rooms in disruptive non-routine events. The collaboration room technology allows the onshore and offshore teams to continuously see each other for better verbal and non-verbal communication in response to code (9) in Table 2 and following Skarholt et al. [32].
Items (i) to (iii) were quickly incorporated into the day-to-day activities. There are attempts to implement items (iv) to (vi). Items (vii) and (viii), though direct answers to difficulties revealed by virtual work, were not implemented for multiple reasons.
The monthly internal meeting (item iii), originally in person, was performed online during the pandemic, with an expert sharing knowledge from his specialty. Considering today’s team maturity, the activity should be enhanced by encouraging the discussion and exchange of experience between the different disciplines with virtual CoP inspiration.
There are attempts to establish limits for online meetings (item iv) and reduce their duration. It is essential to avoid participating in non-essential online meetings with the webcam closed while simultaneously carrying out other more critical activities. Having more experts than necessary in online meetings to prevent losing information is counterproductive. Online sessions should be short and objective, involving only experts essential to the objective of the meeting.
Team-wide chat groups (item v) for each vessel have been created, but smaller chat groups are organically made all the time to address more specific issues. It seems counterproductive to prevent the formation of these chat groups, which can reproduce spontaneous interactions of the collocated work.
Developing a knowledge process to select and treat valuable data from the communication app chat history (item vi) must be efficient to be worthwhile. The amount of chat groups is enormous, as is the amount of chat history formed by all sorts of information used during specific events. This information generates tacit knowledge for the expert but can be easily lost days later, maybe except in his own memory. Some already include valuable information from chat history on their handoff document, which registers a summary of the events from one shift to inform the person in the next shift. This document is already being accessed to retrieve knowledge. Others have the habit of writing down and saving helpful information in a personal file that can be easily accessed in the future and transformed into knowledge. These efforts require time and discipline and should be directed toward sharing valuable information selected for its high value to ensure process efficiency.
Recommendations (vii) and (viii) are two ways to replicate or enhance face-to-face interaction in remote work settings. Unfortunately, it was not possible to implement them for the expert’s team during the pandemic. Online meetings and war rooms usually involved voice, without images from webcams. According to observations and reports from workers, this choice was due to variations in the domestic internet signal that could disturb the connection. Also, during the pandemic, some experts were working from mixed-use family rooms, and having the camera off was a form to preserve their intimacy. However, considering the end of the pandemic emergency, those limitations should be addressed, and webcam use should be encouraged for more efficient onshore-offshore interaction by incorporating non-verbal communication.
Far from being discarded, these learnings need to be better investigated in the search for answers to the difficulties encountered in virtual work.
Limitations and further research
Though the study followed a significant number of workers, the constraints imposed by the pandemic haven’t allowed in-person remote work observations. During the COVID-19 pandemic, data was collected exclusively online, which differs from the in-person observations that EWA recommends. The expected reduction in problem anticipation, loss in agility of non-routine event response, and impacts on information and knowledge sharing were not proven and should be further investigated. Despite the good experience with the virtual support team during the pandemic, how the quality of interaction may have impacted service performance has yet to be proven. Further in-person observations would be needed to give more evidence and confirm the findings. As remote work was restricted to the pandemic period and the experts are already working collocated, observing remote activities will not be possible. However, further interviews and face-to-face validations with workers can be performed and will contribute to confirming the results.
Additionally, the research was based on a single oil and gas company case study and results may have been influenced by population characteristics, cultural differences, and environmental singularities. Nevertheless, the learnings from the remote work experience seem generalizable, are currently being tested, and appear beneficial for the experts’ team. Other companies and markets should be researched to confirm the results are generalizable.
It is challenging to observe the variabilities that are part of the real work activities and distance the prescribed work from reality. Variables operate randomly, and it is difficult to fully observe them on the temporary scale of ergonomic action. The analysis based on observation covers limited periods and a group of specific workers with their individual characteristics that are determinants of work activities (Guérin, 2007/1997). The results may not fully represent the activity variabilities over time and population diversity. Further research with different companies and markets is required to extend the validity of the results.
Future developments are planned to deepen the understanding of the experts’ work activities and provide recommendations for the design of the support team’s services and workspaces.
Conclusion
The remote work experience during the pandemic provides insights into the possibilities and limitations of the expert’s activity. The pandemic had shown that when remote work was needed, it worked. No impact on performance was observed. However, experts report on interviews to miss face-to-face dialogue from the collocated work. Considering quick information through team interaction is paramount for their activity, working collocated may be justified. Having the team together in the same physical work environment facilitates the following:
Conviviality, team cohesion, and trust. Easy and spontaneous verbal and non-verbal communication. Information and knowledge sharing. Dialogue between disciplines in informal CoPs. Easier and synchronized shared understanding (situation awareness). Facilitated prioritization of tasks.
Though virtual interaction cannot substitute face-to-face interaction, the remote experience revealed strategies that can help to reduce its impact on work activities. If remote work is needed, some of the strategies developed during the pandemic and recommended by the literature should be considered:
Meeting regularly online. Using the communication app. Encouraging the formation and participation in Virtual Communities of practice activities. Establishing boundaries for online meetings. Implementing presets for chat groups. Selecting and treating valuable data from the communication app chat history. Stimulating the use of webcams. Implementing collaboration rooms. Providing adequate physical resources (space, furniture, equipment, and infrastructure) for home office users.
The remote experience made experts aware of the value of face-to-face interactions in their work. From this learning, experts can take advantage of face-to-face interaction opportunities to deliberately contribute to a shared and synchronized understanding of offshore operations.
Considering the findings, collocation might be more favorable for groups dedicated to providing fast responses to threatening or complex events or with similar characteristics to the experts’ team, not only in the oil and gas industry but also in similar industries, such as nuclear and chemical processes.
Since this case study confirmed many aspects documented in the literature for knowledge workers in the home office, the reflection proposed may also be beneficial for any other team experiencing problems with the remote environment. Evaluating the limitations of the remote work presented in this paper should help decide whether the team should be collocated. If remote work is adopted, a careful diagnostic should be performed.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The authors have no acknowledgments.
Ethical approval
Not applicable.
Informed consent
Not applicable.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Funding
This work has been carried out with the support of the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico – Brasil (CNPq) and from the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil (CAPES) - Financing Code 001.