How Augmented Reality Can Help Develop the Sense of Belonging in Software Engineers Working Remotely

As more and more people are switching to work remotely due to the current world pandemic, I’d like to share my dissertation submitted for my master’s degree in 2018 which explored how augmented reality can help develop the sense of belonging in software engineers working remotely. Here’s the abstract:

The rise of remote working is creating not only opportunities but also challenges to organisations. One important challenge is how to to develop belongingness when employees are working at distance from their colleagues and the organisation premises.

This study presents a qualitative synthesis review of the literature on the effects of remote working on the sense of belonging of software engineers and explores how augmented reality could help develop it. It examined the topics of sense of belonging, software engineers working remotely and augmented reality with the intention of finding correlations between them as well as providing a comprehensive background and current knowledge in these areas. This review has found that augmented reality could potentially be used to develop the sense of belonging of software engineers working remotely by creating a feeling of presence, allowing for the development of an identity and generating opportunities for informal communication to take place.

However, the research has also shown that the current state-of-the-art augmented reality technology has not yet reached a stage where it would be feasible to use it to develop the sense of belonging of remote employees. Therefore, further research could use the insights from this summary of the literature to direct the development of augmented reality technologies towards practical implementations that could be used in the real world in order to develop the sense of belonging of employees working remotely.

You can read the full dissertation here.