Enterprise companies are making their first moves into the Metaverse, setting up new initiatives and spending more of the work day in virtual campuses. As your team establishes its own best practices for remote productivity and collaboration, it can help to know which features and tools can support your objectives.
If you’re new to the Metaverse, you can download Virbela’s Open Campus to discover how spatial technology drives collaboration that feels natural. With the recent launch of the new Virbela campus, it’s easier than ever to optimize remote work experiences for large companies with staff around the world.
Office Experiences
For your team to grow together, it’s important to share more than common goals. You need common experiences—the kind that can be hard to replicate over video conferencing or email. When you share common experiences, it can encourage the kind of trust required to speak up, explore details, take risks, and execute major projects.
At Virbela, we’ve found these features are crucial to developing trust-based collaboration in the Metaverse:
Individual Offices
It may seem counterintuitive, but when you can scale your workspace to offer your staff their own offices, they start to feel more collaborative. It’s because they feel like they belong.
Most companies can’t afford to give an individual office to every staff member. According to data from Green Street, commercial real estate price indices have jumped by approximately 22% between June 2020 and June 2022.
That can make it challenging to invest in private spaces or even the kinds of offices that inspire staff to do their best work. Instead, staff end up boxed into cubicles or feeling exposed and distracted, sitting in open floor plans.
In Virbela, administrators can expand their campus footprint quickly and easily:
- Within each office, staff can personalize the space with quick furniture configurations, like desks, group tables, and other seating options.
- They can hang images or pull up presentations to be ready for meetings.
- Names outside doors make it easy for everyone to get around campus and help each staff member feel like they’ve got it made in their own space.
- Doors lock when they need quiet time to concentrate or a period without interruption for group work.
Having an office to call your own can make a real difference in staff engagement and loyalty. Compared to virtual work platforms where flat graphics simply act as a legend or indicator of who’s working together, the spatial environment of Virbela allows for the right balance of independent and group work to drive meaningful collaboration.
Presentation Tools
So much of working together involves presenting, even when we aren’t considering the interaction on the level of a formal presentation. We share documents, links, screens, ideas, and more, using a wide variety of basic presentation tools.
When you work in new platforms, there can be a learning curve, but some virtual platforms don’t even offer the integrations you need, forcing you to toggle back and forth between tabs or windows. In Virbela, by comparison, features and tools are integrated for easy, everyday use.
- Web boards function like web browsers, but they appear on the walls of offices or other areas in your virtual campus, like shared space around couches for casual meetings.
- The boards allow you to pull up websites on your own, links your colleagues share via email or in the Virbela chat box, and documents that live in online drives.
- You can also run any assets that live at a browser-based URL on web boards, including games, streaming video or video calls.
- Bring the focus to a special part of your presentation using a laser pointer that extends from your avatar’s hand to wherever you point on the board. Use this feature to call attention to numbers in a table or chart, to showcase an area of an image or to point out a key lesson element in a classroom.
Without these presentation tools, your team can feel adrift, unsure if everyone is on the same page or not. Virbela’s tools help foster a sense of understanding during collaboration for stronger outcomes and more seamless workflows.
Company Culture
As your teams begin to discover their favorite virtual work features, you’ll notice that your company is developing best practices that contribute to culture. Corporate culture is much more than the use of a platform, but each aspect of what it’s like to work together is part of the bigger picture.
Make sure your remote teams are able to recognize and connect with your company’s culture as you work more frequently in a virtual campus.
Big Meeting Spaces
Get together in spaces that feel realistic and connected. How many times have you attended an all-hands meeting, an OKR or QBR meeting, or other company-wide event and felt like it was still just you and your device screen? This is a basic challenge for many companies, especially those that are remote-first, but, in Virbela, it’s an easy one to overcome.
- An auditorium can hold thousands of attendees for kickoffs, all-hands, big announcements, and more. Everyone can see each other, plus it’s simple to click into big screens on stage for a more close-up view.
- The Virbela Speakeasy takes its inspiration from a nightclub lounge, so it’s perfect for social events, creative entertainment, and mingling. You can use this space for overflow or as a pre-event or post-event gathering location. A second-story balcony makes it feel like you’re really in a club setting.
- Outdoor stages, like the one by the beach in Virbela’s Open Campus, lend an air of excitement to big gatherings, too. You can customize these areas to feel like they belong to your company, even if you’re used to meeting in-person indoors.
These larger meeting areas are a major differentiating factor for enterprise companies. With capacity for so many people, leadership and management can begin to form connections with people they may not otherwise get to interact with. By sharing a virtual space where everyone can move and talk, your company culture becomes stronger. This isn’t something you can do in most remote work platforms, but you can in Virbela.
Space to Socialize
Another thing you can’t do in most remote work platforms: Socialize. While many people love remote work for its work-life balance, the ability to chat with coworkers casually and form personal relationships is considered important for mental health. A healthy rapport can also contribute to better conversations, insights, and work products.
In Virbela, there are huge expanses where staff can socialize or chat on the way to meetings or events. Common areas range from open hallways where you can run into your colleagues to outdoor-inspired scenes that take their cues from beaches, mountains, lakes, and other panorama.
Technical Features
One of the most important things you have to determine when you select how your team will work together is the quality of your platform. While many remote work platforms have excellent reputations for a reason, it’s still necessary to check into things like accessibility and uptime.
High Uptime
Emerging technologies can suffer from volatility, but the Metaverse as a whole has shown great stability as a persistent environment. This persistence, which means the environment doesn’t disappear, allows leaders to connect and teams to collaborate, but you need to ensure it’s reliable. Virbela offers over 99% uptime for users.
Localization
As your teams begin to become more connected in your virtual campus, your leadership is likely to expand your remote work practices globally. Be sure your virtual workspace offers the localization you need across languages to include teams in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. In Virbela, the settings are easy for global teams. Just go into the setting menu and adjust the language for it to apply throughout campus.
Together, these features allow your company to make rapid progress towards future-proofing and other competitive advantages. Working in Virbela can give your teams the features you need to succeed long term.
