Finding Meaning In The Metaverse

Innovation Finding Meaning In The Metaverse Julia Martensen Brand Contributor ServiceNow BRANDVOICE Storytelling and expertise from marketers | Paid Program Nov 3, 2022, 07:39pm EDT | Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin How to build real experiences that connect employees in a virtual world. Humans are social creatures. Even the most introverted among us craves connection—without it, our mental and physical well-being may be negatively affected .

People crave connection—and the virtual world delivers. getty This basic need extends beyond the personal and into our professional lives. People want to build real connections in the workplace too.

But with the move to remote and hybrid work, it can be a struggle to cultivate and maintain close relationships. Do we still need the real world to do that? What if we could use a network of 3D virtual worlds to foster social connection instead? Actually, there’s a name for that type of network: a metaverse. Metaverses make it possible for employers to create new experiences for employees, rather than simply replicating what exists in the tangible world.

When moments don’t matter While people say they want to feel connected to each other and their work, evidence suggests they don’t. Research from McKinsey found that millions of disaffected employees have left their jobs since last year, and, while the exodus has slowed in the wake of an economic downturn, data suggests that many are still leaving because they simply don’t feel engaged in the workplace. To understand why, we need to understand how employees interact with their employers.

Boiled down to their essence, these interactions fall into one of these four categories: The employee wants to know something. The employee wants to do something. The employee wants help.

The employee needs care. And these are the moments that matter . These are the moments where the organization’s relationship with the employee is decided.

Creating seamless interactions, intuitive processes, and transparency will lead to happier, more productive employees. Traditionally, and even with the support of digital tools, many of these moments introduce friction into the employee experience. From interviewing to onboarding to getting work done, employees must navigate separate systems and siloed applications.

Instead of streamlining the experience, we have transposed our physical limitations onto the digital world. Going meta The more seamlessly we can map users’ expectations onto digital interfaces, the better their experiences will be. Currently, however, the extent to which we can join the digital and physical worlds is limited.

One solution is to add a third experiential layer—a metaverse—to our societies and economies. Rather than trying to patch a physical hole with a digital bandage, a metaverse enables us to meld the physical with the digital. And with that, it takes digital even further.

Metaverses blur the line between the physical and the digital, they can help businesses construct moments that matter. While we often think of “the metaverse” as a monolith, there are many metaverses. Nike acquired RTFKT , a digital artifact creator, to design assets like NFTs, virtual sneakers, and collectibles.

Since then, the brand has collaborated with Roblox to launch exclusive products and experiences. Gucci and Louis Vuitton have released NFTs and celebrated their 100th and 200th anniversaries, respectively, across metaverses, and Coca-Cola auctioned off NFT collectibles in a metaverse called Decentraland. Because metaverses blur the line between the physical and the digital, they can help businesses construct moments that matter with minimal friction.

Instead of trying to get a user to click on a link that takes them to a page to view a 2D icon and buy a product, the metaverse puts the user in a “room” with a brand. There, a virtual avatar representing the brand can show off a product, providing a much more personalized experience, thus mimicking the physical shopping experience. The reason the metaverse has yet to find its official place in the realm of employee experience is complexity.

Enabling employees to travel fluidly between metaverses or metaspaces—to hang out in an open office using VR and then hop over to a virtual lounge to talk to a support agent—is extremely complicated. In an ideal scenario, businesses could orchestrate moments that matter across metaverses—for example, allocating tokens as rewards that employees could spend in a virtual store, and supporting the continuity of data across platforms, systems, and worlds. People, process, and reality Picture this: A person wants a new job.

They throw on VR glasses and attend a virtual job fair with interactive info desks in the lobby of the hologrammed digital twin of a company’s headquarters—in a metaverse. They can check out the office in a way that’s more immersive than looking at a photo or watching a video; they can even meet their future manager and the company’s founder using AR and VR. Once hired, they can participate in the community by hanging out in virtual social spaces that allow them to mingle with co-workers from the other side of the planet.

Or they may decide to take hybrid work to the next level by bringing their work to a physical coffee shop, with virtual screens and keyboards that are always readily available by putting on VR glasses. Employees have signaled that they’re interested in more training and upskilling than they’re currently getting, but space and time constraints make it hard to pack people in a physical room to learn something new. Imagine if personal workplaces could host training and development sessions using VR and AI-enhanced coaching.

Employees could gain rewards and earn recognition in the form of tokens they can spend in the real or virtual world, a scientifically proven way to enhance knowledge retention—and a much more fun way to learn. The right platform will need to integrate metaverses under a robust system of governance. The technology exists.

All we’re missing is a platform to connect and streamline meta experiences. The good news is that this is a workflow problem, which means ServiceNow is well equipped to help. The right platform will need to integrate metaverses under a robust system of governance so that organizations can track their assets, communicate transparently about status and data storage, and build hyper-personalized experiences.

This is something we do all the time in the digital space. It’s a significant and exciting challenge. At a time when employee engagement is everything, it’s important to build bridges between our virtual and physical lives.

The quality of those connections will determine the success of your organization, because the employee experience is what ultimately makes our world work. Julia Martensen Editorial Standards Print Reprints & Permissions.