Development of methods to enhance staff members’ chats in refresh areas in workplaces for encouraging their knowledge sharing

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to develop the method to encourage organizational members to chat with each other in a refresh area in workplace for fostering their knowledge sharing. First, authors focused on their chat-topics and developed the method to induce their chats on expected topics with applying a big-sized display. The result of the experiment to examine the effectiveness of proposed method showed that the proposed method would be effective on members familiar with each other, on the other hand not effective on members unfamiliar with each other. Next, authors looked the problem that unfamiliar members hardly talk to each other in a refresh room, and developed the method to encourage members to talk with unfamiliar members each other with applying smile recognition and a display. The pilot experiment to examine the effectiveness of that method was conducted and the expected effects were observed in some extent. Furthermore, some improvable points of the experimental procedures were found.