While distributed workers rely on scheduled meetings for coordination and collaboration, these meetings can also challenge their ability to focus. Protecting worker focus has been addressed from a technical perspective, but companies are now attempting organizational interventions, such as meeting-free weeks. Recognizing distributed collaboration as a sociotechnical challenge, we first present an interview study with distributed workers participating in meeting-free weeks at an enterprise software company. We identify three orientations workers exhibit during these weeks: Focus, Collaborative, and Time-Bound, each with varying levels and use of unstructured time. These different orientations result in challenges in attention negotiation, which may be suited for technical interventions. This motivated a follow-up study investigating attention negotiation and the compensating mechanisms workers developed during meeting-free weeks. Our framework identified tensions between the attention-getting and attention-delegation strategies. We extend past work to show how workers adapt their virtual collaboration mechanisms in response to organizational interventions

翻译：尽管远程工作者依赖定期安排的会议进行协调与协作，但这些会议也可能削弱他们的专注能力。保护工作者的注意力已从技术角度得到探讨，但企业正尝试采用组织干预措施，例如无会议周。将远程协作视为一项社会技术挑战，我们首先对一家企业软件公司的远程工作者进行访谈研究，这些工作者参与了无会议周活动。我们识别出工作者在这些周内表现出的三种取向：专注型、协作型与时限型，每种取向在非结构化时间的数量与利用方式上各有不同。这些不同的取向导致注意力协商方面的挑战，而这些挑战可能适合通过技术干预来解决。这促使我们进行后续研究，探讨注意力协商以及工作者在无会议周期间开发的补偿机制。我们的框架揭示了注意力吸引策略与注意力委托策略之间的张力。我们扩展了以往的研究，展示了工作者如何通过调整虚拟协作机制来应对组织干预。