21 Jul After turning in your outline, the next important task your group should be working on is to develop the initial outline into a draft. Although the draft doe
7. Step Seven: Write a Draft
Milestone #3: Draft
After turning in your outline, the next important task your group should be working on is to develop the initial
outline into a draft. Although the draft doesn’t have to be complete or perfect, you should put in as much effect
as your group can. This shows your minimum respect for your classmates who might be reviewing your work. In
sections where it might be incomplete, add brief notes about what you are planning to write. Your draft should
be at least 3-5 pages long, so it reflects substantial development on your work.
COMM 122 Group Assignment Instructions
Summer, 2024, Chengyu Fang 1
Group Project Instructions (40% of the total grade)
Assignment Overview Theories and research in organizational communication help us gain an understanding of organizational
communication processes in various contexts. Lectures in this class are designed to introduce you to a wide
variety of theoretical approaches that have shaped our views of organizational communication as well as current
issues in organizations. While I will try my best to make these lectures as relevant to you as possible, another
excellent way to apply classroom learning to the real world is through your own experience, or through stories
of others, especially professionals who work in areas of your interest. Given that it is challenging to gain direct
professional experience within this quarter, you will instead be engaged with professionals and be encouraged
to make meaningful connections between their experience and theories/concepts discussed in this course.
The objectives of this assignment are twofold. First, I want you to connect with professionals who work in an
area that your group is interested in, and to learn about their day-to-day work. Their stories and own
descriptions of the job will give you a much richer picture of their real work than their job title, written job
descriptions in job ads, or their LinkedIn profiles. Second, I want you to learn about their thoughts and
experiences related to one of the current concerns/issues of organizational communication as they get
manifested and addressed in their organization. By doing so, I hope you will get to learn what various
organizational issues actually look like in a real organizational context, how members and leaders of the
organization communicate them, what policies, rules, or norms are in place to address them, and so on. This
practice will hopefully help you get a glimpse of the culture at the organization or industry that you are
interested in joining in the future.
List of Topics and Issues Below is the list of current topics/issues of organizational communication (along with samples questions you
may ask your interviewees and references) that you can choose from. If your group wants to explore other
topics/issues, you should talk to me and get my approval before moving forward.
Topics & Issues Sample Questions Textbook References
Hiring, newcomer onboarding and socialization
How does your organization hire new employees? How are new employees socialized?
Miller Chapter 7
Organizational/team decision making
What is the decision-making process in your organization or your team? What is a typical meeting like?
Miller Chapter 8
Conflict management What kinds of conflicts do you experience or observe in your organization? How do managers/employees in your organization handle conflicts?
Miller Chapter 9
Leadership What are the styles of typical leaders in your organization? How do they communicate with employees?
Miller Chapter 10 (also in Ch 3 & 7)
COMM 122 Group Assignment Instructions
Summer, 2024, Chengyu Fang 2
Emotion in the workplace How does your organization value employees' emotions in the workplace? Encouraged to express or discouraged?
Miller Chapter 11
Diversity and inclusion What policies are implemented in your organization to promote diversity and inclusion? What are the actual diversity and climate like?
Miller Chapter 12
Technology use in the workplace
To what degree does your organization rely on technology? What features/technologies do employees use? What features/technologies (that were recommended) do employees not use and why?
Miller Chapter 13
Flexible work, virtual collaboration
Does your organization support flexible work and virtual collaboration? Why or why not? What are some pros and cons of flexible work and virtual collaboration in the case of your organization?
Miller Chapter 14
Future of work (e.g., the impact of AI)
Do leaders and employees in your organization discuss the issues relating to the future of work? How do you think your job or tasks will be impacted by AI?
Not covered in Miller
Corporate social responsibility
What does your organization do to address corporate social responsibility? Do the organization’s decisions and actual practices reflect this value?
Not covered in Miller
Assignment Details 1. Step One: Form a Project Group (up to 5 people in each group, finalize your group by Sunday 6/30)
In the first week of class, you should use the opportunities you can find to get to know your classmates and start
thinking about your project group. Groups should be finalized by Sunday of the first week. You don’t have to
decide specific topics yet at this step. Different groups can explore the same topic as long as the
professions/industries you pick are distinctive.
2. Step Two: Pick a Topic/Issue & a Profession/Industry
As a group, pick ONE topic/issue from the list above and ONE job or industry area in which all of you are
interested. You may choose to either select a specific job (e.g., marketing director, event planner, teacher, film
producer, etc.) or a particular industry area (e.g., marketing, PR, sales, healthcare, tech, HR, etc.).
3. Step Three: Develop a Project Proposal and Interview Plan
[Milestone #1: Project Proposal and Interview Plan – due by Sunday 7/7 @ 11:59PM = 2% of the total grade]
*NOTE: You should submit your project proposal and interview plan together as one document.
Project Proposal
Your next task is to develop a brief project proposal. Your proposal should be about 1 page, with clear
identification of the topic/issue that your group is interested in, the profession and job/industry, why this
topic/issue is important in your chosen context, the questions you have, and how the interviews could help
answering your questions.
COMM 122 Group Assignment Instructions
Summer, 2024, Chengyu Fang 3
Interview Plan
Your interview plan should consist of two parts.
Part I: The first part should reflect the following components: 1) Brief profile of your interviewees (pseudonyms1
of your participants, job titles, basic responsibilities, etc.), 2) Brief profiles of the organizations that your
participants work for (names, industries, a few words as descriptions, etc.), and 3) tentative interview schedule
(e.g., who will conduct the interviews, when, how long, how will you conduct the interviews, will you record the
interviews, etc.). You could use a table or other tools to help you organize all these information.
Part II: The second part should include a relatively detailed interview script [see the examples on Canvas]
including greetings, intro, getting consent about audio-recording the interview (if you are recording), main
interview questions (both Part I and Part II), plans for probing questions [follow-up questions that can help you
to gain greater insights into what your interviewee might say], wrap-up, and thank you, etc.
Each interview script should include of two core segments of questions:
a. Part I: Questions regarding the participant’s day-to-day work
b. Part II: Questions regarding the participant’s opinions on Issues of Organizational
Communication (the questions you ask should go above and beyond the sample questions I
provided in the list)
4. Step Four: Recruit Participations
Recruit at least FIVE professionals who currently have the chosen job or work in the chosen industry for
interviews. You could utilize your personal networks or resources available in the Department of
Communication2 or UCSB broadly. To cover theoretical breadth, I’d encourage you to find participants across
different career stages (senior employees vs. junior employees), work arrangements (remote vs. co-located),
location (different states or even countries), demographics, etc. You should feel free to conduct your interview
in a different language but everything you share with your group members and me needs to be translated back
to English. You may interview more than three if you would like to, but no more than eight. Quality is more
important than quantity.
5. Step Five: Conduct Interviews
Once you have recruited a few participants, you can now proceed to conduct the interviews. You can still
continue to recruit participants at this stage if your group still has less than three interviewees. You can ask your
interviewees to connect you with other potential participants (snowball sampling). Even if you are recording the
interviews, I still highly recommend you organize your notes as soon as you finish each interview. Interview
information can fade away quickly and a vivid memory can help you retrieve the necessary content.
6. Step Six: Start an Outline of Your Final Paper
Milestone #2: Outline – due by Sunday 7/14 @ 11:59PM = 3% of the total grade
Outlining is an important part of academic writing. A good outline should describe the core arguments you are
hoping to make and critical support evidence you will be using. You can start working on your outline once your
group has done a few interviews. Step 10 provides more details on what you should include in the final paper.
1 These are fictitious names you give your participants to ensure anonymity 2 To find potential interviewees, you may consider checking out the list of members of the Communication Alumni Council and searching alumni from the UCSB Department of Communication LinkedIn group.
COMM 122 Group Assignment Instructions
Summer, 2024, Chengyu Fang 4
You could use that information to generate an outline of what your group plan to write. There are no formatting
or length requirements for your group outline. However, I’d encourage you to provide as much detail as you can
regarding the overall structure of this paper.
7. Step Seven: Write a Draft
Milestone #3: Draft – due by Sunday 7/21 @ 11:59PM = 5% of the total grade
After turning in your outline, the next important task your group should be working on is to develop the initial
outline into a draft. Although the draft doesn’t have to be complete or perfect, you should put in as much effect
as your group can. This shows your minimum respect for your classmates who might be reviewing your paper. In
sections where it might be incomplete, add brief notes about what you are planning to write. Your draft should
be at least 3-5 pages long, so it reflects substantial development on your paper.
8. Step Eight: Engage in Peer Reviews
Milestone #4 Peer Review – due by 7/28 @ 11:59PM = 5% of the total grade
Peer review when used well could be a valuable step at improving the quality of your writing assignments.
Through providing and receiving feedback, you are not only learning how to become a more effective writer but
also fostering a sense of community. While you want to be respectful to your classmates, you would also want
to be critical in constructive ways. In general, the content of a peer review can often consist of three parts.
Part I: Describe the overall content of the paper which you are reviewing. In other words, you should try to
summarize what is in the draft that you are reviewing.
Part II: Evaluate the overall quality of the paper, which includes both strengths and weaknesses. You could use
the grading criteria for final paper as a base to evaluate the paper you are reading. Specifically, your review
should attempt to address whether this draft does what it needs to do.
Part III: Suggest improvements in conjunction with weaknesses that you have identified. You should offer 3 to 5
specific suggestions on how this draft could be further improved.
*NOTE: the peer review will be done in groups. I will assign the drafts you submitted to different groups based
on the relevance of topics and professions/industries. Peer review arrangement will be announced on the night
your paper drafts are due. However, each of your group members should first read and review the paper
individually. Then, your group should consolidate your individual comments and upload 1-2 pages of feedback
to Canvas. After the deadline, I will send each group the peer review feedback you received.
9. Step Nine: Develop a presentation
Milestone #5: Presentation – due by 7/29 @ 11:59 PM = 10% of the total grade
While you are incorporating the peer review comments and finalizing your paper, it’s also important to think
about how you want to share your findings with your audience. You should develop a 10-minute presentation
and we will save some time for questions in class.
10. Step Ten: Finalize the Paper
Milestone #6: Final Paper – due by 8/4 @ 11:59PM = 15% of the total grade
Overall, while your final paper can be in any structure, it must include the following components:
A. [~0.5 page] Introduction (rationales, key findings, thesis statement)
B. [1-2 pages] Interview Description
a. Description of the job or area your team chose to explore
COMM 122 Group Assignment Instructions
Summer, 2024, Chengyu Fang 5
b. Description of the interviewees (use pseudonyms) and their organizations
c. Description of the interview methods and processes
C. [2-3 pages] Interview Results (based on the interviews)
a. Summary of Part I answers (e.g., important similarities and differences in their day-to-day work
among your participants)
b. Summary of Part II answers (e.g., salient trends/patterns you see among the participants)
D. [3-4 pages] Discussion: Connection (or disconnection) between the Part II answers and the broader
literature
a. (a) whether interviewees’ experiences map onto any of the concepts, theories, models
discussed in the previous literature
b. (b) whether any of their experiences contradict (or offer a different view of) what has been
known in the previous literature
Grading Criteria for the Final Paper • Does the paper offer a clear description of the interviewees and their organizations?
• Does the paper present an in-depth analysis of interviews?
• Does the paper make a good connection between interview findings and the relevant literature (both
from the textbook AND from outside sources such as other journal articles)?
• Are the sources appropriately cited and integrated?
• Do all citations follow the APA style?
• Is the paper easy to follow and coherent? Are there any grammatical errors?
Format & Style Requirements 1. This paper must
a. be typed, double-spaced, with 12-point font and 1-inch margins
b. be 6 to 8 pages long excluding title page, reference page, appendix, charts, graphs, or images (if
applicable)
c. follow the APA style (7th edition). You may find the APA style resources here:
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/apa_style/apa_formatting_and_style_guide
/general_format.html
i. Sources, even if they are from the textbook, should be appropriately cited in APA format
(both in-text and on the reference page).
Submissions For the Group Project Milestones, only ONE person needs to upload relevant documents on Canvas on behalf of
your group. Late work will result in grade deduction: one grade down per day late (e.g., one day late = B
becomes B-).
The final papers produced by groups in this course, highlighting vibrant depictions of various jobs and
organizations, will be helpful resources for everyone in the class who is exploring the future career space for
communication majors. After submission, all groups' final paper assignments will be shared with the class after
being anonymized (will be posted on a shared folder on Canvas).
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Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai . Go Unlimited to remove this message.
All right, hello, so my name is Frank and I'm representative from a group within the class at University of California, Santa Barbara, entitled Organization Communication. Our purpose here today is to gain an in-depth perspective from work professionals relating to a specific topic that our group has selected to write about specifically flexible and virtual collaboration. Regarding confidentiality, none of your answers, nor your name, will be discussed nor described outside of our classroom.
Anything that may or may not have been recorded or noted will be deleted by the end of the seminar 2024, session eight quarter. The main reason for this interview is to discuss the part that remote workplace within your file of work. We ask you to speak freely with holding nothing back, whether your thoughts be negative or positive so that we may gain as honest perspective about this subject as possible, as this will all be held in confidentially.
Now that we've entrusted ourselves and our purpose for being here today, we'd like to get some information regarding yourself and your place of work. So what's your name first? Hi, my name is Brandon Po and I am a senior software developer at Microsoft. Okay, so what's the role are you expected to uphold at your respective organization? So my job is to write software as the primary responsibility, support our service as it runs in production, and as a senior I'm expected to collaborate and help coach and train other employees.
Okay, so what qualifications did you require in order to successfully acquire this position? So mine's a little different. Most people enter this field with a bachelor or master's degree in computer science. They can start out as a software engineer one out of university with a four-year degree.
I don't have a degree, so I was able to get the job with experience. I had experience in the field already that kind of made up for my lack of education. Um, so do you have any previous experience relating to what you currently do at your organization? Can you repeat that? Yeah, do you have any previous experience relating to what you currently do at your organization? Currently, no.
So I had originally started at my organization in IT, and I had previous experience in IT before I joined the organization, which was in 2005. Since then, my software development experience I have through my work. Okay, so thank you for providing that information, and now that we've gotten some background information about you, we'd like to ask you some questions relating to how remote work plays a role in your organization.
So how much of the work is remote, and how many of your employees are working remotely? For my particular team, I would say at any given time, um, probably 50% of the team is working remote at least. When I say my team, it's about 25 people. Um, everybody works remote at some point during the week.
They're kind of snapped to a particular schedule where everybody comes into the office, almost everybody comes into the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and then many people are remote other than that. On top of that, we also have co-workers that are in different locations. So we have quite a few people in Atlanta, Georgia, and we also have one who works out of India, and then a couple people who are just 100% remote, and they're not based out of their own particular office.
Okay, so how do you determine which positions in your organization should or should not be a remote position? So a lot of it, at least for our team, comes down to the preference of the employee that's getting hired. All right, software engineering is a very competitive industry. Finding good software engineers is hard.
So when we find a good software engineer, we typically will accommodate them and either have them work remote, or they will also have the option of going to probably, like, I think most of our on-prem hire is going into our Atlanta office these days. So they basically have the choice of saying, yes, I want to go to Atlanta, or I'm going to be remote. Now, some of that is actually coming back to Redmond.
Some of our positions are opening up in Redmond as well. So they kind of have a choice of all of those things. Okay, thank you.
And how do you manage workplace conflict in the context that one party involved in working remotely and one is in person? I mean, we've been doing this for a while, the remote work, even before COVID. People would work from home for a day or two a week a lot of times, or work later in the evening, come to work, and then we need to go pick up their kids from school, and then go home and work some more. So remote work has been in our organization for a while.
Those were a little rare, but everybody worked from home. We always had the capability of working from home, at least some part, some fashion. Since then, you know, when COVID happened, everybody was remote.
So it was, you know, a steep learning curve for a lot of people. And now these days, we're just flexible. So we're kind of used to it.
Again, especially with the Redmond office. It's just normal at this point to have these conversations. The toughest part is the time zone differences for a lot of things.
Atlanta and Redmond have a three hour time zone difference. India has a much, much, much larger time zone difference. So those are the hardest things, especially for people who have kids out here in Redmond, where they might go in a little later because they got to get the kids to school and everything.
That's a big difference between when somebody might have started in Atlanta working that day, versus when you get into the office. So the number of hours that are available to collaborate with some people is much smaller than if you all worked in the same office. We're all physically in the same place.
I got eight hours to talk to somebody. But for a lot of cases, if we're working with people on the East Coast, that might be only three or four hours. Oh, wow.
All right. What do you believe to be the advantages and disadvantages for remote work? Some of the advantages is you get to be flexible, right? I can do a little work, take care of some personal things, and then get back to work right away. I can work later.
I can start work earlier. So those are some of the advantages for me personally. Disadvantages are mostly around just collaboration, especially around the time zones, like I mentioned.
The other ones are just around, if I'm in the office with people and I have a question, I can turn around and I can see, oh, that person would know the answer to this. And I can just turn around and say, hey, so-and-so, I've got this problem. What do you think? And they can just answer it.
Otherwise, if that person is a remote person, I've got to look to see, are they online on another call, right? Because in order to do anything, you've got to get into a call with somebody. Or you type them a message, and hopefully what your question is can be typed in one or two sentences. You can do it that way.
But if it's more complicated than that, then you've got to get on a call with them. And there's other people that are doing that too. So it's a lot harder to get your spot in line, you know? Yeah, true.
And spend more time on that. And so what technologies have you found most helpful for remote communication? And is it difficult to communicate with remote employees? So, I mean, being a Microsoft, the technology that we use is Microsoft Teams, right? Okay. We developed that, and we have unlimited access to it.
And it is one of the two most commonly used, commonly recommended software for remote work. So those tools are pretty good. We have a lot of options there for what we call either synchronous communication, where the other person is actively responding to you, and you're expecting kind of a real time thing.
Or what we call async communication, which is, I don't need immediate answer. Let me just post a question, and somebody will get to it when they get to it. So we have the capability of doing that as well as just face-to-face video calls.
So, you know, the tools are great. What was the second half of the question? The second one is, is it difficult to communicate with remote employees? I mean, again, the difficulty is around scheduling and getting a hold of them, basically, right? You know, again, especially time zones, and then adding distance on top of that. Like, you know, we have great technology, but when we're collaborating with people in India, you know, there's actually a delay in your conversation, right? You say something, it's another 10 minutes, it's another second before they hear it, and then when they repeat, it's another second before it comes back.
So when you have multiple people on the call, and somebody's trying to answer your question, you can have people talking over each other, just because they didn't realize when they started talking, somebody else had already started talking. So there's that kind of thing, too, as well as people, you know, some people may not have a good connection, so they'll drop in and out, they may not hear what you said, they may, you know, disappear in the middle of their call, because they lost connection to the meeting. So, you know, those are problems you don't have in face-to-face.
So it's just something you've got to adjust to. So how long has it been since your company has decided to adopt remote working? Like I mentioned before, like, we've always had some bit of remote work. Even before COVID, yeah.
Yep. You know, even prior to COVID, we've had some, we've had remote work capabilities, we've had a few people here and there that were actually fully remote and weren't based out of an office. But those were kind of the exceptions, right? Most people were in the office and worked out of the office and worked face-to-face.
But once COVID hit, we were fully remote. And the nice thing was, is because we had the capabilities before and people have used i
