When the UK Government announced that the “work from home” directive was being lifted there were as many groans as there were cheers it seems.
Some would have us believe that the great resignation is being triggered by the pressure some employers are placing on their staff to come back to their places of employment full time.The cheers may well be from those people who truly do not have an ideal environment in which to work from home, or simply those people seeking human contact face to face once again. One thing is true though, the way we work has changed forever.
It won’t simply be that entrepreneurs will no longer fear being caught in video calls working from their kitchen table. It is the fact that most of us who can spend time away from their desks and still do their jobs will be doing it in many ways.
In terms of working hours, well I expect these to change fundamentally. It will become perfectly acceptable for people to work in bursts. Taking longer breaks than the traditional lunch hour and letting their working day stretch over ten or fourteen hours, or maybe even more each day. More emphasis will be placed on ‘getting the job done’, and less will be placed with ‘being at your desk between the hours of nine and five’.
In Trade Extensions, my last company I was more than happy for people to manage their own hours and very often I would be speaking to them, or clients from the woods as I walked my dogs with my wife. When I found my clients or the folks in Trade Extensions were behaving in the same way it made me really happy. Technology has made this possible, and it has introduced something more to the working options which is starting to gather momentum, although it has been available for close to twenty years already. That is the use of virtual worlds.
Last week I was invited into a virtual world for a meeting, using an avatar. It was not the first introduction into the ‘metaverse’ for me though. Back in 2003 I started occupying another world called Second Life. A virtual universe, full of user created places and objects that was to be the next big thing. People then I think saw it as a game, where you chose and dressed an avatar and wandered around chatting to people and getting up to all kinds of mischief. It is still there today. For the first time in about fifteen years, I went back into Second Life last week and it has developed in so many ways into the thing I hoped it could be.
When I was invited to the alternate platform for a business meeting (I’m not going to name it because it was frankly awful), last week. I was greeted by avatars that looked like they were made of Lego. Which is fine, but in truth I think this makes the whole meta verse virtual office experience look and feel like a toy, or worse a novelty. It will be much more than that in my opinion, but not unless it develops in the way Second Life has.
In second life, although animated, the avatars and the surroundings are far more realistically represented. The images are best likened to that produced by DreamWorks in many of their films. My avatar could move naturally, my lips were synched to my voice, my tongue moved, I blinked, I probably could have scratched parts of my body if I had taken the time to find out how. And although the body language used did not relate to the words spoken, that may not be far away.
It is when these virtual metaverses start to look and feel like this that people will take them seriously. When this happens, other problems will arise that we need to be aware of, and mitigate for if we are to have a truly hybrid, in the office, working from home or working in the metaverse working life.
When I started using Second Life back in 2003, I had the view that my support desk could be hosted in the metaverse. I could have my support people, with their avatars meeting clients, speaking to them ‘in World’ and doing demonstrations, training or resolving problems there. I could run my software on a screen inside Second Life. I even had the weird idea, since most of my people worked from home, that we could conduct sales meetings and demos this way. I was not alone, many big companies started to view Second Life as a marketplace or showcase for their goods. Many big names established stores in Second Life, but many just as quickly left when the seedier nature of humans took over.
I think businesses did not see the foot fall of traffic they were hoping for. That could simply have been the fact that in 2003, and soon after, this was all very new. The concept of virtual worlds and avatars was not recognised amongst the general population. The failure of Second Life to attract and hold the attention of big business could simply have been a matter of timing and the lack of the marketing dollars and a dedicated sales team to win their business. The other problem without doubt was human nature. Despite some attempts at control, it was never going to be acceptable, when you were talking to a client, for a naked avatar to hack you and run through your virtual classroom or store dancing and laughing. These things sadly did happen. I’m sure there are more controls in place now, especially since avatars are now very, very realistic.
For us to truly embrace these virtual worlds and use them for business they need to assure us of several other things. Just like Microsoft, Apple and Google put security at the heart of their business now, the providers of the virtual worlds will have to ensure us that they do as well. Hackers will and do seek ways to find backdoors into every piece of software used today. There is, I am sure, still a healthy market in such “exploits and holes”, because they can be used to spy, track, enquire and steal content and information being talked about in these virtual worlds. The providers of these virtual worlds cannot ignore this facet of their business. After all, we all remember the stories of people breaking into Zoom meetings in the early days of the pandemic during its meteoric growth in use.
Assuming this can be done, then I think virtual worlds, such as that provided now by Second Life, with beautiful, realistic avatars and wonderfully designed settings with a world designed by its users using robust voice communications will have their place in our working lives.
So, working from home is here to stay in my opinion, the question will be in which life will your office be?