Metaverse can reinvent how we conduct meetings and accelerate decision making

The situation: Too many meetings have become a major time suck – sapping productivity and hamstringing agility for organizations to make decisions, and the new hybrid work environment has exacerbated the problem. The unique experience paradigm of the metaverse offers opportunities to re-invent and ramp up your employee experience – including a radical challenge to the very existence of meetings as we know them.

A new study by the University of North Carolina revealed executives lose an average of 23 hours each week to meetings. With the kind of open access to people, data, and experiences the metaverse can offer, we can move decision-making out of meetings – and toward the point at which the decision is best made – moving beyond our current practice of using meetings as stage gates, and shifting decision making to the point-of-need rather than a point in time.

That makes for a better employee experience for all involved – enhancing access to data for improved decision-making for all, removing frustrating delays, and supporting improved and accelerated workflows and – ultimately – employee satisfaction. HFS Research identifies employee experience as the key battleground to win the battle for talent – and with that, the right to win in your chosen markets.

Meta, Accenture, and Microsoft link arms to uncover metaverse value

Meta, Accenture, and Microsoft announced at Meta Connect 2022 that they are linking arms to take the future of work into the metaverse. Expect the focus to be on one of the biggest drivers for businesses to enter the metaverse – improved employee experience. Welcome to Teams plus Occulus’ Meta Quest headset. There is no doubt that the future of hybrid work is NOT in hopping from Zoom call to Zoom call – but it could be in immersing ourselves in three-dimensional offices populated by our own curated (and regularly shifting) ecosystem of colleagues, experts, content, and experience spaces.

To take advantage, you should be aiming not for a cooler (but basic) replication of the traditional meeting, but a reimagining of what we need to be able to access and experience to deliver the best possible outcomes from our ‘business meetings’. That may include instant access to the right person, or data point, content, or example experience…or (and don’t let my imagination limit your list…). If you can manage knowledge as effectively as that, the question to ask is, why bother with meetings at all? The metaverse offers the opportunity to bring all you need to decide your virtual fingertips – at any point in time.

The range of capabilities and technologies required to deliver on that ambition (Exhibit 1) will likely demand an ecosystem of vendors and service providers.

Exhibit 1: To deliver enhanced employee experience takes a range of technologies and capabilities combined in ecosystems of purpose

Source: HFS Research, 2022. Vendors are representative only

It takes OneEcosystems of shared purpose to build better employee experiences

Already Meta is offering a VR space for teams to connect and collaborate – Meta Horizon Workrooms where your avatar can interact with others, run breakout groups for smaller discussions, use whiteboards with sticky notes for brainstorming, run multiple virtual screens on your virtual desk, and  – coming for 2023, view 3D models, mix physically co-located and virtual teams to work together, and integrate with Zoom.

The Microsoft-Meta-Accenture connect is recognizing that it will take HFS OneEcosystems of partners of shared purpose to surface new value in the metaverse. Together they will enable the following:

• Windows experience on Meta Quest Pro and Meta Quest 2 devices, offering access to your personalized apps, content, and settings in Virtual Reality (VR).
• The ability to interact with 2D content from Sharepoint or other productivity apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook directly from Meta Quest Pro and Meta Quest 2.
• Join a Teams meeting from inside Workrooms.
• Use your Meta Avatar in Teams for whiteboarding, brainstorming, and meetups.
• All are supported from an enterprise security point of view by Microsoft Intune and Azure Active directory support.

Accenture has used 60,000 of the Meta Quest headsets in employee onboarding – opening up its Nth floor virtual campus – co-created with Microsoft – to 150,000 employees. It has committed to working with Meta and Microsoft this coming year to help enterprises use VR to engage employees and customers and create products and services in the metaverse.

Meta is looking to extend its ecosystem, opening applications to its new ISV program and adding to established relationships with Autodesk and Adobe.

TCS applies its metaverse tech to employee onboarding. Capgemini scales 3D partnership to extend talent pool

TCS has been deploying its TCS Avapresence Foundry to use metaverse technology to onboard employees in the last year, too. Avapresence is an extensible extended reality (XR) enterprise cloud platform focused on 3D collaboration with personalized avatars in immersive workspaces. TCS is also enabling haptics so that you’ll be able to ‘feel’ the hand you shake.

Capgemini’s partnership with 3D tech specialists Unity focuses on defining and executing sector-specific solutions and professional services to deliver tailored platforms for enterprise clients, defining methodologies, conducting joint R&D, working together on business and solution development, and scaling up certified talent in the use of Unity’s real-time 3D technology.

The headset approach has limited use cases – Google’s alternative limits chats to the 3D video chat booth

The VR-focused, headset-dependant approach to the metaverse is currently aimed at quite specific markets and use cases – architects, engineers, builders, creators, and designers. The Meta Quest Pro headset is priced at $1500 as it goes on sale in October 2022. Potential productivity gains may make that investment worthwhile, but unknowns remain – such as the impact on relationships with in-the-room colleagues, well-being, and potential lock-in to ecosystems with clear and dominant players (such as Meta, in this case).

Meanwhile, Google’s project Starline offers a headset-free 3D holographic experience to improve the sense of the presence of the person you want to talk with. Its restriction – as it begins to roll out real-world prototypes – is that the conversation can only happen in dedicated ‘3D video chat booths’.

The Bottom Line: Reject the employee experience-enhancing capabilities of the metaverse at your peril

Employee experience is the frontline in your battle for talent. Win the battle for talent, and you win your markets. Do you really want to put your teams through the daily dirge of back-to-back Zoom calls when an explosion of virtual, augmented and extended reality opportunities to improve their experience is within your grasp? Those who fail to embrace the possibilities the metaverse offers will fall behind as surely as those who initially rejected the employee experience-enhancing value of access to the internet.

Watch this space for our first-ever Metaverse Services HFS Horizons report, coming soon.