One might assume that the resident faculty expert on artificial intelligence at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business is fascinated by technology, but it turns out that what Roshni Raveendhran really wants to understand is people.
As a psychology major at the University of Texas at Arlington, the future assistant professor of business administration found herself exploring “how people interact with their environment and what the implications are for their relationships with other people,” she said. The natural next step was to explore the workplace, the environment where so many spend most of their waking hours and develop many critical relationships.
As Raveendhran pursued a doctorate in business administration at the University of Southern California, revolutionary advances in technology and artificial intelligence put devices at the center of human culture. But she didn’t ask the usual question of “How do people use their smartphone or smartwatch?” Instead, she looked at the relationship.
“We take our technologies seriously because we want to learn about ourselves and understand how we behave. But what if a human being told you that you’d been sitting for four hours and needed to move around? The experience would be different,” she said. “People experience feedback from technology as informational, rather than evaluative, and I wanted to understand the specific psychological dimensions to the human-technology relationship. What made the technology appealing to you and what kinds of interactions do you have with it?”
Raveendhran brings more than a human-centric view of technology to Darden. She describes herself as sitting at the “confluence of two countries and two cultures.” Born in India, where most of her family still lives, she cherishes her Tamil roots and at home she speaks the language, one of the world’s oldest and an important unifying force for the Tamil people. “I see language as a channel for holding on to culture,” she said.
But her U.S. roots are equally deep: “I went to school here; I grew up here and my whole adult life has been spent here. I am deeply intertwined in this culture.”
For Raveendhran, her husband and her 2-year-old son, home is where all the strands are woven together. “We try to have a little bit of both,” she said.
The human dimension also played a critical role in bringing her to Charlottesville.
“When I was on the job market after getting my [doctorate], my first-ever job talk was actually at Darden. And I was blown away by the community, the culture and just how welcoming everybody was,” she recalled. “So when I started considering offers, I couldn’t stop thinking about how incredible this place was. It became the obvious choice. I never thought I’d end up on the East Coast, in someplace that wasn’t warm year-round, but the student-centric nature of Darden was something I couldn’t say ‘no’ to.”
Collaboration with fellow members of the faculty, particularly professor Tami Kim, led Raveendhran to advance her research into other areas.
“I still focus on humans and technology, particularly artificial intelligence, but I’m also looking at AI as an intermediary in relationships between people,” she said. “It’s important for us as a society to think about how to leverage all these technological tools to empower our people to provide their best work and bring their full self to work, whatever that looks like.”
The topic could scarcely be more relevant since the massive upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic, which dramatically expanded technology’s role in nearly every aspect of work. Working from home, instead of the office, for instance, has brought Zoom and other technological tools to the forefront of organizational culture. But oftentimes there are not established norms for their use, and technologies can have costs that organizations do not recognize.
To understand these, “you have to look at the psychology of the people using the tool,” Raveendhran says.
With instant message options, such as chats in Microsoft Teams or Slack, Raveendhran and Kim found several benefits, including speed and an informality that was efficient and built trust. But there was a cost, too. Psychologically, most people feel obliged to respond in real time, a far different burden than people experience with email.
“That puts a lot of pressure on people. They feel like they’re ‘on’ all the time,” she said. “We found that when organizations say, ‘If you get a chat after hours, you are not obliged to respond,’ it helps set a new norm” that reduces the cost of using the tool.
Looking through that lens, debates about whether it’s “better” to work from the office or home are misleading; a bit like asking whether a saw or a hammer is a “better” tool, she said.
Raveendhran sees discussions about whether to go back to old ways of working as little more than tilting at windmills. Those that think carefully and purposefully about technologies are poised to raise the benefits and lower the costs of using them.
“It’s not really up for debate. The world has changed, whether we admit it or not,” she said.
“During the pandemic, we discovered that people actually worked a lot more hours and companies were very productive. People realized that they wanted to work on their terms, and that they could be very productive on their terms,” she said. “Exploring that in a meaningful way, instead of pushing the issue aside, is going to be critical for organizations.”
Norms are powerful tools, Raveendhran said, but only if they account for how human beings really think and act.
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April 30, 2024
