Will the employee engagement be transformed for the better by the metaverse?
‘Meta’ took second place in 2022’s ‘word of the year’ list published by Oxford University Press. But words of the year can fall into two camps – either they’re just current buzzwords, or they’re a true signal of meaningful change. ‘Meta’ may well turn out to be the latter, although some sceptics still think otherwise.
Meanwhile this year, CES – the world’s largest technology conference, which boots the start of every new year into the future – showcased technologies to support the world of work in the metaverse.
The question remains, however: is the metaverse the cutting edge of innovation in the employee engagement? And if so, how do we get there?
What is the metaverse anyway and what’s it got to do with employee engagement?
If the metaverse is new or confusing for you, you’re not alone. For some quick background: the metaverse is an umbrella term for a new way of engaging with digital technology. Instead of using a screen, the metaverse allows us to enter an alternative, digital reality, and have a more physical and immersive interaction with a digital world.
We can enter the metaverse through ‘virtual reality’ (VR), sporting an immersive headset that projects around us a 3-dimensional world that we can move through and engage with. Alternatively, we can use ‘augmented reality’ (AR), where digital objects are transposed over the world in front of us, so we can interact with a blended digital and physical world.
Gamers have already been playing with both VR and AR for several years, especially via the popular ‘Oculus’ platform, which is now owned by Meta. Until recently, the world of the metaverse has remained a digital playground, rather than a potential new professional platform. However, it looks like that’s about to change.
Will the metaverse lead to innovation in employee engagement?
Before we go racing off discussing the seismic shifts the metaverse might bring to the employee engagement as we know it, let’s consider the practicalities.
Various companies are developing enterprise-facing platforms for work in Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. The biggest players are Microsoft and Meta (the artist formerly known as Facebook).
Both companies have built platforms that will enable employees to join immersive virtual calls, interact as if they were present in person with their colleagues, and get more of a sense of what Bill Gates calls ‘presence’ when they’re working together. This is one of the most obvious ways we’ll be able to work in the metaverse – it brings our colleagues ‘closer’. Instead of looking at your team on a screen, you’ll feel as though you’re sitting round the table with them.
There are other ways that both VR and AR can revolutionise the way we work. For example, during the COVID-19 Pandemic, a hospital in Israel introduced training modules on an AR platform to teach busy, pressured medical staff how to use unfamiliar emergency room equipment, fast. The program showed which buttons to press and how to use each piece of kit by projecting instructions over the real-world equipment in front of them, so nurses and doctors who’d been brought in to cover an unprecedented emergency could get up to speed very quickly.
So, AR and VR have a role to play at work. They’ll enliven everyday team meetings and create buzzy staff events, pulling us all into a connected, presence-focused digital workplace. And that’s not all: AR and VR also offer the potential for immersive, powerful learning and development programs. It’s clear that platforms like Meta’s Quest and Quest Pro, and Microsoft’s Hololens2 present major shifts in the way we could all experience life at work.
Are we there yet?
These powerful innovations have a transformative power for many sectors.
For example, in the field of education, virtual reality educational resources could transform how disadvantaged groups across the world are able to access high-quality, engaging educational resources. However, a few questions remain – especially around how close we are to a vision of work in the metaverse, and whether or not that’s a desirable innovation for the employee engagement.
Firstly, for companies who want to use this tech at work, financial and logistical investment in either of the two major enterprise-facing platforms from Meta or Microsoft (or their competitors), will be complex. And for end-users, blending VR-enabled work with more common-or-garden laptop screens and monitors could be tricky, as some colleagues start to feel left behind, working on older and increasingly out-of-date equipment. In other words, this could bring a whole new level to the digital divide.
Plus, large-scale digital and technological transformation within a workplace is a major challenge. Anyone who has tried to encourage an organisation to adopt new technologies and ways of working knows that the change communications landscape and process is inherently slow and frequently met with opposition to shifts. And that’s not even taking into account the challenges of rolling out such demanding and complex tech at a large scale.
Within the next two or three years I predict most virtual meetings will move from 2D camera image grids […] to the metaverse, a 3D space with digital avatars.’
It is possible to engage with VR platforms via older technology – for example you can join a ‘workroom’ in Meta’s Horizon Workrooms platform, both from a standard video call, or from within your virtual reality headset. This provides some wiggle room for blending the capabilities of both if businesses are taking time to enact a major tech changeover.
Change is coming, however: ‘Within the next two or three years,’ Bill Gates wrote in 2021, ‘I predict most virtual meetings will move from 2D camera image grids […] to the metaverse, a 3D space with digital avatars.’ Many of the biggest companies that shape our digital experience globally are pressing ahead towards the metaverse, which means our daily lives will follow suit.
Change may not be as rapid as Gates predicted, however – although we have seen rapid-fire change at large scale very recently. The COVID-19 pandemic brought a boomtime to laptop manufacturers as businesses shifted to remote working and left desktops gathering dust in the office. Moving your teams over to the metaverse would require a similar large-scale roll-out of new tech, plus an adjustment period as colleagues adapt to a totally different way of working digitally.
For organisations prepared to make that technological leap, the process will be tricky, and many colleagues will need increased support for a completely new way of engaging with technology. There are significant benefits, especially as more of the world adopts metaverse tech – however, we are already seeing a gap widening between how employers, entrepreneurs and leaders feel about the metaverse and its potential, and how employees on the ground feel.
Resistance is futile?
In a survey of 1500 employees, and 1500 employers in the United States, 77% of employers are interested in and excited by the kind of innovation in employee engagement the metaverse offers, while only 57% of employees felt the same way about ‘immersive working’. This is quite a gulf.
Among business leaders and employers there is more familiarity with the technology and more interest in what it can provide. But there’s a knowledge gap for employees themselves. From their perspective, they’re hearing the buzzwords and hype of ‘the metaverse’, but there isn’t yet a clear picture of what this might mean for them, and how it’ll change their employee engagement.
One of the biggest concerns that rose out of this same survey was the potential for employers to conduct remote surveillance on their workforce.
These headsets allow employers to track their people’s real-time location and monitor their productivity, possibly even gathering biometric data on their employees throughout the day. And looking at attitudes towards the metaverse, employees were more likely to regard the concept with suspicion and anxiety, while employers and business owners felt excited and optimistic about the power of immersive virtual working.
There are other factors at play around how employees feel about the metaverse as well. In November 2021, Lenovo conducted a survey of 7,500 working adults in the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Singapore, China, and Japan. They found that nearly half (44%) of employees surveyed would be willing to work in the metaverse. However, almost the same proportion of survey respondents said they doubted their employers had the knowledge or expertise to pull off such a digital transformation.
So potential resistance to the metaverse from employees takes many forms. Some employees are concerned about their privacy and the protection of their personal data. Others are interested but doubt their employers’ ability to make the vision a reality. And others still have wider worries about how well they might adapt to working in the metaverse, and adopting a totally new way of using technology.
What are the benefits for the employee engagement?
It’s probably sensible to ask why it might be worth the hassle of adopting it in the workplace. What exactly is the benefit of embracing work in virtual reality? Is this kind of innovation in employee engagement really worthwhile?
We all know that the world of work has changed irrevocably since 2020 – hybrid or remote work is becoming much more the norm across many industries. And many people report that they feel happier without long commutes or spending time in a busy, crowded office. At the same time, however, there’s a definite loss to be considered: people lose the sense of connection and ‘presence’ that working in person with your colleagues can provide.
This is one of the biggest promises from the metaverse: virtual reality claims to be able to give you a sense of ‘togetherness’ that a laptop or monitor screen simply cannot provide. And, alongside that, as we explored earlier, virtual and augmented reality allow us to expand the capabilities of work into new horizons.
For many industries, the power of AR and VR is immense: practising a technique in virtual reality can reduce the risk of real-world errors in the construction industry, while road-testing prototypes in digital form can expose potential design flaws and improve development of new products. Clearly, embracing the virtual world could accelerate many industries and sectors.
VR and AR programs can also be used to explore complex and sensitive topics at work. Some innovative companies are developing virtual learning experiences, in which the learner experiences the work environment by ‘inhabiting’ the body of someone with different diverse characteristics from their own. PwC have used VR training to explore issues of racial bias in the workplace, while the BBC used VR immersion sessions to help design a workplace that is more accommodating for neurodiverse colleagues. This kind of activity can help to generate real empathy in a way that simply hearing someone else tell you about their experiences cannot – because the participant gets to feel the same emotions and challenges as their colleagues might.
There are so many case studies and examples of ways in which the metaverse could radically alter our working lives. And while there are still some negatives to iron out (whether that’s around privacy and monitoring of employees, or the energy consumption of virtual reality headsets), it’s clear that the big tech companies are forging ahead in their exploration of the virtual universe. So perhaps, whether we like it or not, the metaverse is making itself at home in our world.
So what?
What does all of this mean for us in the internal communications world?
Well, on one level, we’ve got an exciting opportunity ahead of us – as well as the ultimate test of our skills as communicators. Because for any organisation that decides to embrace the metaverse, one thing they’ll certainly have on their hands is a communications and engagement challenge. They’ll be taking people on a journey from current ways of working – using screens and computers, and meeting via Teams or Zoom calls – to a hyper-connected, virtual-reality based world where they can feel as present with colleagues as if they’re back in the office. And that will involve many layers of change.
This sort of innovation in employee engagement isn’t just about adopting a new digital tool. VR and AR come with completely new physical languages for interacting with the virtual world – colleagues will need to learn new gestures, actions and movements to be able to interact successfully with the virtual world around them. That’s a major set of skills that people will need to learn at speed and scale.
Working in the metaverse will require a totally different kind of etiquette and behaviour, too, as well as ways of working. What are the new norms? How do we approach a colleague, or collaborate? What will we regard as personal space? How do we work together most effectively and make the best use of these powerful new technologies?
These are more than teething problems. They’re major issues to be solved. And excitingly (or alarmingly) the solution, to a greater or lesser extent, lies in your organisation’s ability to communicate and land change. Which, of course, puts internal communicators firmly in the spotlight.
If you can get the people and communications side of the change right, then the metaverse is your oyster.
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