COVER STORY: How the metaverse will reshape the office

While the metaverse might be associated with odd-looking avatars and creating a whole new digital life, it is also becoming a part of everyday work experiences.

By 2026, 25 percent of people will actually use the metaverse one hour a day and 30 percent of organisations will actually have products and services ready for the metaverse, a Gartner report said.

The Harvard Business Review noted that organisations can use metaverse technologies for various tasks in the office such as having additional collaboration, chillout zones, skill development and even digital humans.

HBR authors explained what digital humans will do, “These AI agents will act as advisors and assistants, doing much of the heavy lifting of work in the metaverse and, in theory, freeing up human workers for more productive, value-added tasks.”

Digital Nation spoke to several leaders on some of the future technologies leaders could see in their office in the years to come.

Melissa Witheriff, director, regional innovation lead at Avanade said she is taking active steps in terms of starting to support organisations to help build their metaverses.

She told Digital Nation, “We see it as this fusion of that physical and digital spaces to create a way for interaction, but also a way for collaboration as well.

"It is about not only the benefit for workplace experience or how people will work here from into the future, but then it's also about that customer or consumer experience as well.”

Employee experience

The metaverse implementation in the office is all about immersion and experience, enhancing mundane, run-of-the-mill daily activities. 

Witheriff said the metaverse will be used in two distinct ways, as an immersive space and a space of ownership.

“Firstly, the internet of place which is being a sense of being in the metaverse rather than on the internet so that immersive piece. The second piece is about Internet of ownership, using the ownership of identity of audiences and tokenised assets.”

The next step is taking the core building blocks of the metaverse like 5G, blockchain, VR and AR to create a commercial world.

“How do we take that to the next level, to really enable different types of engagement that also new commercial opportunities and new places and spaces for people to interact?” she said.

The metaverse will be used for remote working and training, Witheriff said.

“We see it in terms of that employee experience, we have remote collaboration, remote operations, meetings and events. We're doing that right now ourselves. I've got metaverse spaces built that our people are going through we use it for workshops and executive programs as well,” she explained.

“Training is a massive use case we've got work happening with clients already in terms of creating simulated environments for training.”

Disaster recovery

Another space the metaverse is being utilised is disaster recovery and practising emergency procedures. Witheriff said modelling those things which are really useful for C suites and boards to be able to have digital twins.

She said, “When I was working in banking, one of the things we had to do was simulate getting our disaster recovery program in place. You come up with a scenario, you walk through, a flood or fire, how do you stand-up assets? How do you mobilise your people in different ways?

“Being able to create digital twins to create scenarios in an immersive experience, you can sit around a boardroom table and have the reality as much as it is reality, the scenario built around you so that you can explore what it truly feels like in that experience to get as close to real as possible.”

Witheriff explained that simulating those unsafe scenarios is a huge opportunity and use case that she is currently exploring.

“Thinking about the police service, defence, a pilot simulation, how do you create a close to the real scenario for people to train in those situations? I'm also exploring lots in terms of healthcare, so not only remote surgery but also things softer skills, like having difficult conversations with patients,” she said.  

“How do you talk to children that if they've got a chronic illness like diabetes, how can you immerse them into a gamified experience where they start to understand how the body works and can actually talk in that way? We're doing some use cases around that right now.

This can also help those in disability services.

“If you think about people who may be on the autism spectrum and need to learn how to catch buses, how do you simulate that in a safe way? There's emerging training happening in that space already.

“Exposure therapy, for example, there is an extraordinary number of use cases that are coming forward in terms of being able to create an environment that we don't have today. This gives a level of safety, but also a great user experience to teach skills in unsafe scenarios,” she added.

Intraverse

Employees could soon be brainstorming in an offshoot of the metaverse, which Gartner has dubbed the “intraverse” an amalgamation of the metaverse and the intranet.

Marty Resnick, VP analyst at Gartner said that organisations are adding metaverse virtual offices as part of their current intranet initiatives.

“If they're going to upgrade their intranet because they're dealing with all these flexible work styles and places. Basically, a dispersed geographic employee base and they were looking at their intranets and found they weren't enough, so they were updating them.

“At the same time, they were saying, ‘maybe we can start creating virtual offices', let's bring those initiatives together.”

This led to the creation of the term “intraverse”, Resnick explained.

Because the technology is still in its infancy, employees need to be guided through a VR crash course.

“What I usually recommend with organisations, believe it or not, is they get a tiger team of 10 people together. The first thing that they do is play Beat Saber and get used to VR.

“The next thing they do is they meet in VR and in more of a social aspect, so they get used to the environment, and then they have a very targeted meeting,” he said.

What's important when it comes to virtual meetings, is the goal is not to replace every meeting that you have all day because you're not going to spend eight hours a day in VR, Resnick said.

There will be certain meetings that can still be on a video call and others that better work on the intraverse.  

“If we're doing product design and brainstorming then it makes sense to be on the intraverse. People see it as a tactical thing rather than changing everything over,” Resnick said.

“It's definitely not utopia, but I think in certain scenarios, people see it as more beneficial. I was speaking to one company and what they did is they created a virtual office and they wanted to encourage people to come into it and they use it for social events.

“They had a shark floating all the way through it, and he became the mascot and the pet of the office. People would be in an immersive analytics meeting and all of a sudden a shark would just go by and it was cool because you’ve now got personality.”

While there are no measurable ROI metrics due to it being such a new technology, Resnick said so far, he said that users are feeling “more engaged” and “more connected”.

“When I go into a virtual office, I'm still commuting into an office, I still feel like I'm part of the company," he added.