Distributed Team Workload Assessment Tool

Complex tasks found in current military environments often require multiple individuals working from distributed locations. Individuals must complete their own tasks while communicating with team members to develop shared understandings of situations and allocations of responsibilities. These situations can result in high mental workload that cannot be effectively managed by one individual. Because team members in modern environments do not always work within close proximity, new challenges are encountered when teams work on a common task. A collective awareness of a situation and tasks is critical to team effectiveness; each team member"s role often depends on other members. Each team member"s mental workload and the distributed workload of the team are important measures of a team"s effectiveness and likelihood of success with workload being a critical construct because of its associations with objective performance. Low workload can result in boredom and failure to maintain situation awareness. Excessive workload can result in task shedding and performance decrements. Tools that evaluate workload for individuals exist, however there are no tools that effectively evaluate team workload. This proposal seeks to identify methods for developing a tool capable of assessing the workload of a distributed team as they strive to complete a shared task.