Virtual and hybrid working configurations are becoming increasingly common for engineering teams, where they rely on virtual collaboration platforms. These new working configurations challenge existing collaborative patterns, affecting teams’ ability to reach successful outcomes, such as innovation. Yet the digital trace data produced when teams use virtual collaboration platforms presents a promising opportunity to measure the social phenomena that affect collaboration outcomes. In this thesis, I demonstrate the measurement of four innovation-influencing social phenomena from engineering design teams’ Enterprise Communication Platform (ECP) data:​ diversity and inclusion, conflict, Psychological Safety, and shared understanding.

In the first chapter, I developed a top-down linguistic approach for measuring gendered language in Slackmessages, showing that the language style used influenced how messages were engaged with. This study contributed a novel algorithm for measuring gendered language and an updated understanding of gendered patterns on modern platforms.

In the second chapter, I used mixed methods to understand how conflict happens on ECPs, and how it is harnessed towards innovative outcomes, highlighting the critical role of emergent leaders. This study contributed to our understanding of the mechanisms behind the relationship between conflict and innovation, and laid the groundwork for future algorithms that recognize and manage conflict in real-time.

In the third chapter, I took the first step towards an automated measure of Psychological Safety from Slack data, finding that aspects of Slack use, such as replies, reactions, and mentions, may be more promising than keywords for future algorithm development.

In the last chapter, I designed and built a Slack application with algorithms that measure and display a team’s levels of shared understanding over time. The application helps teams identify and reflect on misunderstandings while also collecting data from teams securely, enabling future research on how shared understanding is built. This chapter contributed to the application and a mixed-method evaluation of the applicability of the algorithms.

In sum, this thesis contributes four studies of innovation-influencing social phenomena and advances systems for real-time measurement. These measurements are required to identify when teams are struggling, motivating future work towards real-time interventions that help teams effectively collaborate on virtual platforms.