Report of the working group to identify future challenges faced by the implementation of resource management in remote and distributed teams

Abstract

Crew Resource Management (CRM) was introduced on the commercial aircraft flight deck to promote pilots acting in a well-coordinated manner. This was a result of several accidents where aircraft with no, or minor technical faults, crashed from a failure to utilize effectively the human resources available on the flight deck. CRM draws upon the disciplines of management science, organizational and social psychology. It originated in civil aviation, but its practices have now been adopted in other high-risk, high-performance industries where staff work in coordinated teams, e.g. Air Traffic Control, surgery, nuclear power operations and shipping. CRM is now facing new challenges to promote effective, coordinated teamwork. Teams are often now distributed across many locations but are still required to coordinate their activities in real time. CRM now must evolve to support the actions of remote and distributed teams. At the 2023 HCI International Conference in Copenhagen, a working group formed from subject matter experts to identify application areas and describe the key challenges faced in promoting CRM for remoted and distributed teams both during normal and non-normal operations. This paper describes the workings and initial findings of this working group. The results show that process areas, such as such as promoting Team Situation Awareness, workload management, coordination, and monitoring of the cognitive and affective states of others are more important for developing remote and distributed team CRM than are addressing the limitations imposed by the underpinning technology.