Exploring the Future of Work in the Metaverse

Are you prepared for the future of work? Will you be at the forefront of a revolutionary shift, or will you be left behind, much like Kodak when digital photography rose to prominence? In this engaging episode, we converse with Henry Massey and Andrew Mawson, experts on the brave new world of the Metaverse and its potential implications for our working lives. We unpick the vibrant tapestry of the Metaverse, contemplating an immersive, inclusive, and story-driven hybrid working environment that could drastically alter the way we collaborate, fostering visibility and promoting a sense of community.

Imagine the Metaverse as a sociological experiment, an arena where humans will represent themselves and form tribes. How do we build trust in this virtual realm, maintain authenticity, and tackle challenges such as a Metaverse class system? Our discussion in this episode dissects these intriguing questions. We stress the importance of regulations and policies to foster an inclusive and safe Metaverse environment, explore the generational aspects of this new world, and reflect on how individuals might 'dress' to fit into their chosen tribes.

This transformative potential of the Metaverse isn't limited to social interactions - it will impact the corporate world too. The onboarding experience, the training and upskilling processes could all be revolutionized. Picture a more immersive onboarding experience that could significantly boost employee satisfaction and retention. Think about training methods that harness the power of virtual reality for higher memory retention. And guess what? Some organizations are already making waves by implementing these innovations. So, buckle up, join our conversation, and let's navigate the future of work in the Metaverse together.

Mentions:

Matthew Ball's book - The Metaverse and How It Will Revolutionize Everything
Forbes article: How Kodak Failed

AWA Host: Karen Plum

Guests: 

• Henry Massey,  Co-founder and Chief Metaverse Officer, Elora & Head of Emerging Technology, Workplace Evolutionaries
• Andrew Mawson, Founder & Managing Director, AWA

 AWA Guest details: https://www.advanced-workplace.com/our-team/ 

CONTACTS & WEBSITE details:

AWA contact: Andrew Mawson 

AWA Institute contact:Natalia Savitcaia 

Music: Licensed by Soundstripe – Lone Canyon

Want to know more about AWA?

• Follow us on LinkedIn
• Visit our website

Thanks for listening to the DNA of work podcast

Transcript

Karen Plum: 0:00

Hello there. Do you remember Kodak? If you're old enough, you probably bought Kodak film in the days before digital cameras and before we all had cameras in our smartphones. Despite having invented the first digital camera back in the 70s, they were very focused on selling physical film and missed a golden opportunity to get into the digital camera market when it steamrollered into view. They came to that market way too late, and perhaps the latest thing we all need to keep in focus is the metaverse, so let's dive in and find out why.

Karen Plum: 0:37

Welcome to AWA's podcast, which is all about the changing world of work and trying to figure out what's right for each organization, because we know that everyone is unique. We talk to people who have walked the walk, who've got the t-shirt and who've learned lessons that they're happy to share with us. I'm your host, karen Plum, and this is the DNA of work. For Kodak, it wasn't that they were in complete denial about digital photography, but that they thought the uptake would take much longer and would be a minimal threat for quite a while, giving them much more time to make the transition. I'm simplifying the story, but you can read about it, and there's a link in our show notes. I think it's a powerful reminder of the need to keep up with the times.

Karen Plum: 1:25

If you're exploring the metaverse or you don't think it's anything to do with you (for now), then I hope my two guests will give you some food for thought. They are Henry Massey and Andrew Mawson. Henry is co-founder and Chief Metaverse Officer at Elora, providing solutions for metaverse and Web3 needs with services designed to help people navigate the complex world of the metaverse. Henry's also Head of Emerging Technologies at Workplace Evolutionaries. Podcast regular Andrew Mawson is AWA's Founder and Managing Director. Having started his career in the tech sector, he's a keen follower of evolving technologies and is always on the lookout for how their use can help organizations. I started our discussion by asking Henry to explain what the metaverse is exactly.

Henry Massey: 2:15

Going from the definition from Matthew Ball, which is the author of Metaverse and How it Will Revolutionize Everything - t his is the definition from the Web3 community and everyone who's in the pioneer space - it makes sense to this community, this is where we're actually thinking metaverse is. It's a massively scaled and interoperable network of real time rendered 3D virtual worlds that can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users, with an individual sense of presence and with continuity of data such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications and payments. But if we're going to boil that down completely to something that's going to be a little more simple, the metaverse is an evolution of the internet. It's a layer of infrastructure that will enhance the way the internet interacts with the real world.

Karen Plum: 3:06

The idea of continuity and there being a world that you can go into, and, Andrew, I think you and I were discussing this in terms of the context of the office, so that there would be an office environment that, during my working day, I could hang out in.

Andrew Mawson: 3:22

It seems to me that our reality is what ends up being between our ears. And if you think about human brains, you can generally see human brains being in a black box fed by information that they get through the various different senses that we have. So if your senses are being conditioned by and fed by other stimuli in the external environment, then that's real. So where I'm sitting today is real. If I was immersed in an environment which is created through a technological context, that would be real. So the sort of idea that we've been working with around workplace experience generally, has it being a sense by sense, second by second immersion, is precisely the same as the metaverse, it seems to me. And therefore, why wouldn't we be able to create something which is as good as, if not better, then we can create in a physical environment and maybe, because it's not constrained by physicalness, it can solve problems that we can't solve in the physical environment, perhaps.

Karen Plum: 4:35

Yes, and I guess, in the world of hybrid working and the inevitable sort of pull back to the physical office, we're looking for something that enables us to engage with our colleagues in a more realistic, more natural way than just having to take part in meetings. And I guess, Henry, that's the sense of what we may be looking for and heading towards in the case of going to work.

Henry Massey: 5:06

I think what we're going into is creating more of a storytelling type of experience.

Henry Massey: 5:14

If you could go back hundreds of years, how we were all raised and developed in the world was through storytelling, and that's what is ingrained in our minds is, if you tell me a story, most likely I'm going to remember that story that you told me. That's how I'm going to learn and process forward. So I think what's going to be happening in the workplace going forward is not what we all think about is just sitting in front of you and me in front of a conference table having a discussion about something it's going to be. We're going to be interacting a whole different way. That's going to be a little more immersive. It's going to be more inclusive. It's going to have a story behind it. At least that's how we should create it and not try to recreate the wheel saying let's just do brick and mortar, walls and windows, but no more. Let's be together to create community. Let's be together to experience life in a different manner, with a different lens, which will bring in a whole different way of how it is that we work together.

Andrew Mawson: 6:02

If you think about hybrid working, most people are having Zoom calls, Teams calls and so on but, as somebody who runs a business, at any one moment in time I only really have visibility of the meetings that I'm involved in. I mean, I could have visibility if I wanted to, to look at everybody's diaries and do all that kind of stuff. But one of the things that we lose in moving to this virtual model with the existing technology is we lose my ability to see the bigger picture. Who's around, who's doing what, who's interacting with who? I can't overhear anything very much from other people's conversations. We've kind of compartmentalized in a sense.

Andrew Mawson: 6:43

So in terms of the metaverse work I've been doing is thinking about how could we create a metaverse that would enable me to overcome some of the things that I know I've lost through the pandemic and beyond. So it's kind of interesting because when you start looking at all that, you begin to realise that it would be perfectly possible to create an environment that does a lot better. Just to pick up Henry's point, we're not here about redesigning offices in the metaverse. We're actually here thinking about how can we construct situations where we get the things we need from a work perspective but in a virtual perspective, and I think that's, you know, that's the exciting thing is to get beyond just thinking about this as a physical incarnation in a virtual world.

Karen Plum: 7:31

In doing my research for the episode, I was looking, Henry, at the work that - i s it Virbela, is that how it's pronounced? So their founders were very focused on high performing teams and what high performing teams need, and it was those sort of emotional and social connections. And I know from our research in AWA we know that the cohesiveness of teams is a really important factor in how well they perform. So how are Virbela leveraging that, or how does their way of using the metaverse help them in that sense?

Henry Massey: 8:10

I can definitely speak to how people are using Virbela today, as people are trying to build community and trying to educate, I think, the masses on what the potentials are and the opportunities are.

Henry Massey: 8:23

There have been several communities that have created I don't want to call it a brick and mortar, but let's call it the same.

Henry Massey: 8:31

They've replicated an office, if you will doors, walls, windows, whiteboards, all that good stuff - something that you and I would walk into physically. But the difference here is it's not necessarily a place where they are doing work, in air quotes, but it is a place to where people are building community, and what I mean by that is they are bringing people together to have meaningful conversations, purposeful conversations, things that are relevant, that are interesting to certain types of people, whether it be in the workplace, whether it be about DEI, whether it be about you as a person, what interests you. Keynote speakers, if you will, or people who are knowledgeable of certain topics, come in. They have a conversation. People from all over the world are able to come into Virbela and listen to these conversations, but not only listen, because they're doing this in the format of yes, they're sitting down at a round table, conference table, and they're looking at a screen of an actual 2D person like how you and I would be looking at each other through a Zoom meeting.

Henry Massey: 9:30

Right it's a hybrid experience to where it could be like a combination of a Zoom, to where I can see your face from a really like this point of view. That can see your emotions, you're smiling, I can see you're interested, I can see if you're passionate about something. But I'm sitting in an avatar perspective looking in. Now, what's happening here is that I have people who are all around me, who are also in an avatar format, to where I can have that symbiotic experience like Andrew was mentioning. I can look to my left, I can look to my right, I can see where people are, I can see if they're moving around, I can see if they're not engaged, not in the sense of human emotion, but whether are they staring at a wall? Are they not interested? Are they? You can tell kind of by their interactions. Are they engaged in the conversation?

Henry Massey: 10:12

Because there are emojis that you can clap, you can wave, you can dance, you can do all kinds of things that share that sense of emotion.

Henry Massey: 10:20

But what happens here is you have people who are communicating via text. So in Virbela there's an area to where you can engage in conversation like you would right now in a chat room through Zoom. Right, you can have a conversation. You can say, wow, I totally resonate with what Karen is saying, and people can also engage with what you're saying from a text standpoint. And then, of course, after the conference is done, you know, and they open it up to Q&A, people have the ability to get off with their avatars and they can speak to the crowd right and after this, of course, what I think is really cool and important is, after the keynote speaker is done with their Zoom meeting and they go back and transform into their avatar, you can engage in conversation anywhere in this environment. So, just as you would in a conference, you were like, hey, keynote speaker, that was an incredible conversation. I'd like to know more. You could be having those one-on-one conversations with someone inside of an environment like.

Henry Massey: 11:18

Virbela, right, like, and perhaps the environment that you're in is too crowded, it's too noisy. You say, hey, let's go walk to this one corner here where it's a little more quiet, less people are being rowdy or whatever it might be and have that conversation. And people can naturally come in as they would in real life hey, what are you guys talking about? And join into the conversation. But more so, I think what's really cool and what's happening is people who are interested in these topics are getting together. They are meeting each other for the first time to where normally that would not have happened.

Henry Massey: 11:48

Right, because if we have a webinar or a conference, people log into a Zoom meeting, they listen to the keynote speaker, they log off, but no one has an interaction with each other. They have no idea you even exist. I can see that little bubble on the right-hand side that says, oh, so-and-so is logged in, but I don't know who you are because I can't have a conversation with you. The Metaverse is allowing you to do this. It's allowing for that interaction, that organic conversation, to take place.

Henry Massey: 12:13

The water-cooler moment if you will right to happen, and this is something that doesn't happen today. Right now, in a hybrid sense, it's just, it's not possible. So that's what's happening today.

Andrew Mawson: 12:24

I think it's kind of interesting because maybe different generations view this in different ways, but the idea of an avatar has been around a long time. Do you think that's a goer in the long term?

Henry Massey: 12:34

There is a lot happening in that space and there's a lot of different conversations, philosophical, DEI, and it is very generational, I think, from a generational standpoint, the older, let's say millennial and up, are looking more for how I identify most with how I look today, with the option, of course of saying I want to represent myself the way I want to represent myself, meaning clothing and so on and so forth, right? If you look at the GenAs, if you will, and you look at their interactions with environments like Roblox, the Roblox characters are very cartoonish, right, but at the same time, these cartoonish things can change with how you want to represent yourself. People aren't going to care necessarily what the people outside of your circle think you are. It's going to be the people who are inside of your personal circle that are going to matter and they're going to know you because that is your community, that is your tribe and that's what's happening inside of the Metaverse right now. Is, if we think about the sociology of the Metaverse, and what I mean by this is, humans themselves want community, they build tribes. We're doing it today. Right, if you look at how we interact with the internet, we have social media groups that we join, whether it's on a political standpoint or religious standpoint, it's an interest in music, culture or something. We join particular groups, because that's what we do as humans we try to find people who are part of our tribe.

Henry Massey: 14:10

So I think what's happening is that's going to be the new foundation of what it is that we're going to be doing inside the Metaverse. We're trying to find groups that we belong in. We're trying to find people that we're going to interact with, that believe in what we believe in, and therefore that inner circle will say hey, Henry, you want to be a type of person today, great, but they're going to know who I am as an individual. If you look at what we're having in the Roblox right now, people are already building that community and they don't know who, let's say, the friend Andrew is, who's across the world. But they build connection with these people. They have true relationships, things that they would go support each other because they now trust them. They've done things inside environments together to build that trust.

Henry Massey: 14:54

So I'm going kind of in multiple directions here, but the point is is that I don't think what your persona is today in avatar perspective is going to matter too much, because I think the whole point of it is how do you want to represent yourself today? Because there's going to be multiple different types of personas that you can adopt. I can be more salty today, and I want to be wearing black and a weird outfit. I want to be more creative today. I'm going to wear a different outfit with a different face, but maybe 'Henry' will still be on top of my avatar, so people know who I am, but it'll represent how I'm feeling that day, right, or how I want to represent myself, and that's the whole push, or the whole DEI thing too. We talked about putting ourselves in the shoes of other people too. With that whole concept of mind. I think it's also generational.

Henry Massey: 15:45

Something that we experienced and we did bring this up and we tested it was if you go - and let's say it again, let me use Virbel a in this case - if you go attending these conferences and you look at people, most of them are going to look very professional. They're going to have their little slacks on, dress shoes, a coat, have their hair done very well and, because they're representing who they think they need to be in a professional standpoint. Very rarely do you see someone come in with a purple mohawk and a suit, and this is because people really feel like they're like. Well, I'm not sure how I'm supposed to engage with this platform, how I'm supposed to look in order to be accepted, because it's a brand new realm. Right, we as humans are trying to find acceptance as well. We don't want to necessarily step out of the norm and be looked at and saying oh wow, Henry's being a rebel, he's wearing a mohawk today.

Andrew Mawson: 16:42

Do you think people will start to dress up in a way that reinforces the fact that they're fitting in with the tribe, just as they do in when you join a company? You learn pretty quickly the things you need to do, the rituals you need to perform, the clothes you need to wear, all that stuff. You learn that pretty quickly about what is it you need to do to survive in this organisation and thrive. So do you think people are going to do the same thing in the Metaverse context?

Karen Plum: 17:10

Can I jump in there just for a second? I guess what this strikes at is at the heart of whether people feel comfortable showing who they really are at work and this is at the heart of the diversity, equality and inclusion agenda is wanting people to feel psychologically safe to be who they are, to express their views and opinions and not to feel that they have to conform to the norm in the group that they're joining.

Henry Massey: 17:38

I think organisations are going to need to have policies, they're g onna need to create standards and they're gonna create regulation before they even consider anything right, because exactly that.

Henry Massey: 17:47

How do you tackle situations of that nature? How do you bring psychological safety? How do you allow people to represent themselves the way they want to? There's going to need to be something that's going to be enabled inside of this environment to allow this type of interactivity. It's one of those things that I think as pioneers and as we create these environments, we need to be very, very cautious of. The Metaverse is not supposed to be a structure of class. What we're trying to avoid is creating that hierarchy. Wealth, class one, class two, class three, whatever right, your mid-class, your low-class.

Andrew Mawson: 18:26

I mean, there may be organisations out there who don't want to embrace that idea. In fact, they would go the other way. They actually want to create status differences in order to reinforce hierarchy and do all the things that the traditional organisation operates. But I guess that's. Everybody's got the opportunity to take technology and use it in ways they want to, I guess.

Henry Massey: 18:47

You have t o remember that the Metaverse is going to be a combination of multiple 3D virtual worlds, so you might have one virtual world who's going to say yes, we believe in brand, we believe in the class structure, but the whole point of the Metaverse is to be able to be interoperable, to jump between different environments and experiences from a larger scale, as mentioned in the definition. Right, I don't think that we can control how every single virtual world is architectured and what type of classes they create in the hierarchy, and all that jazz. But everyone can create their, I guess, their own environment, but they're going to have to have certain rules that apply to each one.

Andrew Mawson: 19:24

If I have a corporate Metaverse in which my employees work and in whatever form that employment ends up being, whether it's community of contractors or employees or whatever else, presumably I'm going to want to make that Metaverse a reflection of what I want the world to be, and my rituals and my values and all those sorts of things, and I'm probably not going to want to connect that world too much with the outside world, am I?

Henry Massey: 19:54

Well, the goal is for the ability to have that interoperability being connected to the entire galaxy, which is what we call the Metaverse.

Henry Massey: 20:04

That is the goal - is to really enable the cross pollination, if you will. However, yes, there are going to be opportunities from a security standpoint to say I can limit the experience of outsiders when they come in through the form of NFTs. You can use NFTs as a batch, for example, and it says okay, Andrew, when you come into our location our experience, you must carry this NFT in your digital wallet, which will grant you access to XYZ. Versus an outsider who does not contain or have this NFT in their digital wallet, they' ll be denied access. However, they might be able to explore your experience or your surroundings from an external standpoint and say okay, I'm curious of what this experience may be, which would be an opportunity for you to say I'm okay with educating the outside folk to understand who we are as an organization. They want to learn about missions or values. Maybe have someone on the outside to educate them, but in order to access it, requires a different type of permission.

Karen Plum: 21:12

Okay, so moving on just to a couple of the areas that I think perhaps are being used not in a full metaverse sense, but perhaps in terms of virtual reality or augmented reality are the two areas of bringing on board new people and training and upskilling. I think those are probably two areas that most organizations could see some potential for. Could you tell us a bit about the developments that you've seen in those two areas, Henry?

Henry Massey: 21:44

Sure, so I can cover new hires and training. There are organizations out there who are really focusing on the experience of onboarding, because you cannot deny that today's onboarding experience is bleak. As I think about historically all of my engagements with different organizations when I was onboarded - it's typically that very dull conversation with HR, they give you a PowerPoint presentation you know, welcome, here's your benefits and your packages and it's very little on just understanding who or what the organization is all about. Usually I walk away not really fully understanding the culture or the people behind it. But a survey indicated that remote workers can experience feelings of disorientation by 60% and devaluation at 52%. I think onboarding experiences can greatly impact the employee perception of the company and their decision to stay and leave.

Henry Massey: 22:43

So what's happening right now? A lot of organizations are starting to see this. I wouldn't say a lot, actually, I can probably count in my right hand how many organizations are starting to actually dabble in this one but what they're doing is that they're bringing people in and they're creating that experience, that storytelling experience. This is who we are. This is our mission, our statement, our values, large companies that I have in mind.

Karen Plum: 23:08

I'll spit ball one - Accenture's doing it right.

Henry Massey: 23:10

Last year, I think, they onboarded 150,000 individuals inside of the Metaverse and they all reported incredible satisfaction that they're able to meet and engage with folks across the world that they would never done. They're able to gain access to resources, train ing materials that they probably never would have on the first day of class. So I think what companies are really focusing on is creating more of that experience that's going to be memorable from let's provide additional resources and allow you to connect to your colleagues and your managers from the get-go, because that's something that you also don't do, right, you just kind of disappear for three days. You're reading manuals and you're kind of trying to figure things out, but imagine, on day one you get to meet your manager and avatar perspective who might walk you through HQ the true, real HQ.

Henry Massey: 24:05

That is, let's say, let's call it San Francisco, for example. It's like, hey, let's walk together. Let me show you the organization. We can walk through the physical space If you ever come visit the space, this is what it's all about, this is who we are. This is the culture. You can see people they wanted to be working somewhere they can't be. You can interact again with your colleagues. So that's what people are doing right now.

Karen Plum: 24:27

And I, as an individual could perhaps curate that experience for myself by following what interests me and looking at the resources that I think are going to be relevant to me, or consuming it in an order and in a way that suits my personality and my interest.

Henry Massey: 24:44

Exactly. So if you think about some technology solutions today, when, let's say, you implement a piece of technology, in some cases they have that cool feature to where you say, basically, you walk the golden road inside the technology solutions like, oh, a little rabbit's jumping around. digitally. It says, okay, click here and then do these following things and see how this works. This is the value add to you. You can do the same thing inside of the Metaverse as well. They can say curate your passage, I don't want to go right, I want to go left, I want to experience what's to my left. And you click on, let's say, a wall or something on the floor and you can engage with it in a whole different way. So you curate your experience in that sense, that's something that's being enabled today.

Karen Plum: 25:28

And in terms of training and upskilling, perhaps retraining individuals for Metaverse opportunities or services which are enabled by Metaverse technologies. Those sorts of training experiences would be delivered in the Metaverse, so it's all sort of part of the same world.

Henry Massey: 25:51

Yes, so I think a perfect use case to talk about is the manufacturing industry. I was doing some research on this because I was very curious on how people are learning how to, let's say, create iPhones. If it's brand new technology, I never thought about this. It's not just robots who are creating the iPhones, right, there's assembling and all that stuff. People are behind creating actual products, putting it together. How is it that they learn to do this? What is the format that they're trained to do and assemble this new technology? It's not like something we just download our minds and there you go. We trained on this, and so what I discovered is organizations are bringing in more of the AR VR concept to allow individuals to train in a virtual world on how to assemble something, to actually have them go through the motions of how, you know, let's put together this phone, let's put together XYZ, whatever it may be. And there was a study I think it was conducted by Stanford University that talked about how folks who use the VR solutions reported 50% higher memory retention when compared to the digital or the other training method of just if here's a PowerPoint presentation or let's sit in the class.

Henry Massey: 27:07

And the other cool thing, too, was, this allows organizations to understand where are my employees in terms of being ready to deploy this piece of equipment or this product, because what we want to do is avoid having trial and error. That's cost, right. So if someone goes in and like, okay, I'm going to put together this product, they get it wrong. That's going to be something that's going to have to be totally disassembled. Maybe they break something. This is all cost, time. So if you say, okay, I want to make sure that my employees are hitting a 70% passing rate. Therefore, when they hit that 70% mark, then they can go to line, start working because they're ready, right. So what this allows organizations to see what are the bottlenecks, perhaps in the areas where people are failing more, what areas are more difficult for the mass majority to understand, because maybe the way that we're instructing people how to set something together - does it make sense to them as it does to us.

Henry Massey: 28:04

They can quickly troubleshoot and find these areas that are the bottleneck and say, let's, let's readdress this. Or again, how do I know when a certain group is ready? Well then, you can find out based off that VR, right. Inside the workplace, I'm thinking to myself where do I typically find bottlenecks when I have onboarded organizations? I think the biggest bottleneck for me is understanding the process. Where do I go for things? How do I do it? What is your form of doing things in your organization? I can think about historically what I've done in organizations and then apply that into a new one, but that's not necessarily always the right way. So I think in workplace, that is an opportunity for us to paint again that story. You throw on AR VR and you walk them through the process in a story like manner that says - this is who we are, these are the expectations we expect from you, Henry, and so that when I walk away, I clearly understand the expectations that you have of me, I know exactly where I'm going to get my resources, because it's laid out for me.

Henry Massey: 29:12

Here's step one. This is where you go to get following files. Here's where you go to get your training materials. How do you interact with your team, how do you book your space and how do you conduct group collaboration sessions. These are all things that you can create a story inside of the metaverse today. No one's really doing that very well, by the way. I haven't seen anyone do it, but I'm speaking organically from my own mind. This is how I would do it if I was someone who lets say a CMO, inside of an organization. How am I creating experiences within the organization that is going to make a very seamless experience for my end users.

Karen Plum: 29:49

OK, I think probably need to wrap it up now. I'm thinking that the question I'd like to ask both of you perhaps, Andrew, for you to start, is what should our audience be taking away from the discussion that we've been having in terms of what they should be doing now?

Andrew Mawson: 30:09

My start point is we are where we are. The world is as it is, and so the thing that ultimately, people will swap out the existing world for a new world will be things that they perceive to have some value. You know, if you look at hybrid working, the reason why we've got hybrid working is that most people feel that there is value to them in not trundling into an office every day and saving some money, but also working quite effectively with colleagues and having a different life balance. Now, if we think about the metaverse, it needs to be a solution to a set of problems, and the first thing it seems to me is to understand what those problems are around the hybrid working world. You know Henry's talked about some of them. I think there are a bunch of others that we suffer from because technology you have is pretty good, but it's not the same as being physically together. So I think, first of all, people need to think deeply about their organizations and the needs that they have, and then I think they need to kind of get their heads into what these technologies are really about and what they can do when they will be useful.

Andrew Mawson: 31:27

My personal view is that there are a couple of barriers in the way, and we kind of talked about this a little bit, but I think avatars are a barrier at the moment. I'd like to see photo real avatars be an option. Ok, I might want to dress slightly differently, but I still want to know that it's Henry or Karen that I'm looking at in the corner of my eye. I also think headsets are a problem. I don't think headsets need to be necessarily a huge problem.

Andrew Mawson: 31:53

I think there are other ways that we can interface with the metaverse which would be much more comfortable for people. So I think the trick is understand what are the things you're missing and, I think, understand what's going on with the metaverse, but track it, because it's changing quite quickly as well. And I think somebody in your organization ought to be kind of a bit of a lookout into the metaverse world to see which different companies and there are lots of them now are coming forward with different ideas and different things, because I think, ultimately, it's a question of imagining what the world is going to be like and intercepting it as quickly as you can.

Henry Massey: 32:33

So, to tag on to what Andrew is saying, I think organizations need to be thinking about their strategy now. People ask - "when should I get into the metaverse? The answer is now yesterday. The metaverse is the next evolution of the Internet. It's going to happen, regardless of whether you like it or not. Organizations need to be thinking about how are you going to utilize it, either now or in the future. What is that one use case that you're trying to resolve now, that pain point? You need to think about how you are trying to communicate your message. Who are you as an organization? If you look at the history of the evolution of the Internet Web 1, Web 2, Web 3, what we're working?

Henry Massey: 33:07

on now there are still some people who are still stuck in the Web 1 era. They're not using Web 2. What I mean by that is posting pictures. They're not using e-commerce, but they just want to post something on the website and walk away from it, while there are some industries in organizations that really do need Web 2, whether it be for advertising or for being able to sell a product.

Henry Massey: 33:32

As we evolve and go into the Web 3 environment, not all organizations need to have a virtual world. They don't need to invest in digital real estate. However, if they're trying to communicate or help people understand who they are as an organization, maybe it's just in the sense of advertising. Maybe they just need to have their logo inside the virtual world and that's it. They don't need to have a physical building. They don't need to have a serious presence, it's just their logo. I think organizations just need to figure out again where do they want to position themselves, like Andrew was mentioning. What are your pain points? Also, realize that we don't have a view inside of all of the different use cases for the Metaverse. We have no idea. We talked about a couple and there are definitely a handful of use cases that are taking place today. But just like when we were in the Web 1 era, we had no idea what we were going to do with it in the future.

Henry Massey: 34:26

We had no idea that we were going to be able to post pictures, buy things from the internet. We thought it was going to be something that we read from. I think as we get into the space, that is exactly what I'm recommending organizations do. Just get into the space, spend a couple hundred not a hundred, it's like a couple of $10,000 to just explore it, because what will happen is that when the Metaverse does come to its full force, you'll at least have tested it. You'll know the holes that you need to go into. You won't be completely new to the space. You'll have maybe established one use case and be able to explore and build more on it. Versus if you wait, like Kodak did decades later.

Henry Massey: 35:08

I think they finally got into digital camera realm a decade after digital cameras were actually in the space way too late. If you're an organization who's a lagger, you might be way behind the curve, depending on what your strategy is. That's why I recommend people just get in now. Work with a consultant if you need to, to understand all the different environments that there are, like Andrew was mentioning. Just get introduced to it. Build a little bit. If you need help to understand it again, work with consultants to do that, or bring out people who do get it as an FTO or whatever and just start exploring. I think that'll be highly beneficial for you in your future in the Metaverse.

Karen Plum: 35:45

So there you have it, just dive in. As with AI, which we covered in an earlier episode, things are happening quickly and if you don't start exploring what it could mean for your business, chances are you'll be left behind. If you explore and keep track of how things are developing, you'll have a better chance of intersecting the technology when the time's right. And that's it for our exploration of the Metaverse for now. Many thanks to Henry and Andrew for their company on this journey, which we did without bulky VR headsets or funky avatars, but maybe we should try that next time, because I want to keep up to speed as the Metaverse worlds develop. If you'd like to hear future episodes of the DNA of work, just follow or like the show. You can contact us on our website, advanced-workplace. com. Thank you so much for listening. See you next time. Goodbye.