Indicating engagement in online workplace meetings: the role of backchannelling head nods (Pre published)

Abstract

Amid COVID-19 and the so-called ‘digital pivot’, online virtual communication has been placed at the heart of our daily lives, both professionally and privately. As we move into a post-COVID context, the affordances of the digital turn have shown that we can operate professionally online but there is a need for a better understanding of communication in the online workplace. This paper first contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of indicators of engagement in multi-party communication online, as evidenced by a small-scale but in-depth corpus-based multi-modal study. Second, it showcases the importance of building naturally-occurring spoken corpora that go beyond written transcription of the spoken word and include annotation of non-verbal behaviour. The work pays particular attention to the incidence, frequency, position and function of spoken and head nod backchannels, exploring the coordination/co-occurrence of these features in online talk. Findings point to a changing profile of how engagement is displayed in online workplace meetings and this appears to be linked to the functionality of the platforms.