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Rethinking NASA Science From A Remote Work/Telework Perspective

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
March 15, 2020
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NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

3 responses to “Rethinking NASA Science From A Remote Work/Telework Perspective”

  1. ThomasLMatula says:
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    This is good. Having worked for three different universities that went to telework environments the key element is to change from the mindset of inputs (hours spent in office) to one focused on outputs (tasks accomplished). The second is proper training and orientation in both the technology tools and etiquette of remote work to create the proper culture of working remotely.

    • fcrary says:
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      Focusing on output can difficult in some fields. Scientists are a problem for most objective measures. The number of papers published? Some people will just publish lots and lots of largely content free papers to drive up that statistic. And publish them in obscure journals who are desperate for submissions, if that’s what it takes. An h-index or something similar, combining publications and how often they are cited? Some people react by making sure their papers and their friends’ papers have a long list of co-authors, and that the papers always cite their own work extensively. Fortunately or not, scientists are good at working with numbers and figuring out how a system works. That’s practically part of the job description. Any objective measure of performance or accomplishment is a system which can be figured out and gamed. You can insert subjective decisions by managers and colleagues. But that actually opens the door to all sorts of discrimination and bias. Not just the ones, illegal ones people usually think of, but also things like whether or not the manager likes someone, or how personally popular someone is with their colleagues.

      I’m not saying hours spent in the office is any better. Telecommuting or not, performance in many modern professions can’t be measured in hours. If you work on an assembly line in a factory, then time probably is a good metric. But in other cases, it’s not meaningful. I guess I’m simply saying that it’s hard to find objective measures of accomplishments which can’t be gamed.

      • ThomasLMatula says:
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        I was not thinking in terms of academic papers, but more in terms of work tasks. For example data collected, or experiments run. But in practice its worked out between you and your supervisor based on organization needs. I imagine at NASA they will create flow charts of the tasks needed to be done, virtual meetings attended, etc.