Critical technologies underpin the metaverse and how it impacts the enterprise and its’ employees.
By Lebogang Chaka, principal director for talent and organisation at Accenture in Africa
Extended Reality (XR) for instance, promises to provide enterprise with the metaverse access to elevate the employee experience, especially in an increasingly digital world. Here, the employee is at the centre of each interaction where the employee’s credentials and certifications enable metaverse navigation, custom learning journeys and simplified processes.
This process also provides an organisation with the correct data to manage, engage and reward talent.
Accenture defines the metaverse as an evolution of the internet that enables businesses to move beyond ‘browsing’ to ‘participating or inhabiting’ in a persistent shared experience that spans the spectrum of our natural world to an entirely virtual world in between.
When evolving work identities with decentralised digital identities (DDI), the Metaverse will require organisations to engage with their employees and customers across the worlds. Employees need to bring critical aspects of their identities into these worlds, and these exchanges are seamless.
DDI, enabled by distributed ledger technology, allows employees to share stored verifiable credentials from their profiles with authorised parties eliminating the need for re-verification. DDI enhances the employee experience, eliminates the time, expense and inconvenience of reverifying credentials and builds trust, authenticity and security into the metaverse.
The individual has the benefit that they can manage/maintain data to prove and provide holistic representations of their identities that allow them to move across all worlds in the metaverse seamlessly. Their organisation can more accurately assess and quickly verify workers as they are onboarded to an organisation and into their metaverse applications.
The world of work has changed
The past two years have accelerated the adoption of virtual technologies in the workplace, where employees and contractors are eager to evolve how they work. They are ready for immersive experiences and seek new ways to engage and collaborate. A recent Accenture survey showed that companies care and are prepared to adopt the benefits that the metaverse hold for the world of work.
The world of work is becoming more digital, and 70% of employers are already adopting hybrid work models. Companies are reimagining hiring and onboarding in a digital world and how they ensure their employees and customers remain healthy and safe. The study clearly illustrated that the workforce welcomes greater flexibility.
About 59% of the survey respondents indicated that flexibility is more important than salary or other benefits. The survey demonstrated that working from home has many benefits and drawbacks, with employees experiencing increased feelings of isolation.
Companies found that hybrid working models bring significant cost savings. The Accenture study illustrated that companies could save up to $11 000 per employee annually by moving to a virtual working environment for half the week.
The metaverse and the advent of virtual reality training are bringing greater training effectiveness. In the survey, Accenture found a 275% increase in training effectiveness, with VR learners feeling more confident in their skills than classroom learners. It holds many benefits for the entire training continuum.
The constant use of digital meeting platforms also has a downside. Fatigue from such platforms has become tangible, and more significant interaction is required. The decreased mobility, fewer social cues, more cognitive load, and constantly seeing oneself are stressful.
A more “real” experience is needed to overcome such stress. The metaverse now brings employees together in a shared space that can replicate in-person collaboration, socialisation, engagement and “hands-on” learning from anywhere at any time. It meets employees where they are.
Facilitating a meaningful employee journey
Incorporating an enterprise-wide metaverse brings value across the entire employee experience or journey. The extended reality coupled with DDI transforms the employee experience bringing the workplace to the employee and aids in the future of work evolution.
Right from the first impression, when the employee is attracted to join a firm, through the onboarding process and training, the engagement is more meaningful and of more excellent value to both the employee and the employer.
Significant interaction in the metaverse enables better collaboration between workers. It reforms how employers can manage the performance of their more engaged workforce.
Greater engagement promotes growth for the individual and their contribution to the business. Learning new interpersonal and business skills improves XR collaboration and enhances the standard of work across the organisation.
Adopting extended reality can bring lasting impressions where sustained career growth is possible through team building, job shadowing, reinforcement of culture and meaningful rotational programmes, amongst others.
Reaping the benefits by building a strong .Next Worker Roadmap
Changing how organisations collaborate and connect with their employees improves business results through engagement in the metaverse.
Increased engagement in events and training, increased collaboration through dynamic experiences, provides employees with means for managing a broad set of credentials and enables remote engagements.
Greater efficiency in a .Next Worker model is possible with increased productivity, increased retention through training, putting personal work data in the hands of the employee, and supports faster decision making.
Reaping such benefits requires having and following a clear roadmap to a strong .Next Worker offering:
* Learn – Initially, one needs to understand the challenge to be addressed. Organisations can experience VR via off-the-shelf experiences and then identify and prioritise areas of opportunity where this can add value to their business. The organisation must explore potential use cases to determine where dynamic credentials can enable the company’s future vision.
Invent – The firm needs to confirm the target audience and context of use and select one idea to dive deep into. It will include agreeing on technical architecture, solution infrastructure for UI/UX design, and appropriate team size, skills and responsibilities unique to the organisation. A PoC network is then established with a focus on a single dynamic work credential supported by an issuer.
* Incubate – This phase is to create, test and learn using agile methodology. It includes working in sprints while applying SCRUM techniques where applicable. The stage expands the credentialing network to include additional work credentials by adding supporting issuers to the network as part of the incubation .Next Worker adoption.
* Scale – Finally, the aim is to build a production-ready experience VR environment that will provide a continued experience use case refinement and user adoption. Organisations develop their pipeline of additional VR use cases that will add value to both the business and the employee journey. A scalable network will prove the value that will, in turn, attract additional clients, bolstering the company’s commercial model.