Two ways to start making the future of work a reality
We've talked a lot about how people might work in the metaverse, but what about some real examples? We explore how these charitable organisations are already making the future of work a daily reality.
The future comes at you pretty fast. At Meta Connect 2021, we shared a vision for the metaverse that included new ways to help people collaborate and be more productive at work. Just a year later, we announced the progress that we've made towards building that future.
There's a lot. We announced Meta Quest Pro, our all-new VR headset designed with collaboration and productivity in mind. We added new features to Meta Horizon Workrooms – purposefully built and optimised for the Meta Quest Pro – to help you be more productive, collaborative and creative. And we announced a new partnership that brings Microsoft's popular productivity tools together with Meta's virtual reality devices.
But this is just the beginning. Before organisations step fully into the immersive world of the virtual office, and before they present themselves (and be present) in the mixed-reality meetings of the future, some companies are already taking full advantage of today's tools to take their first steps into the future of work.
Here's how they're doing it and how you could, too.
Workplace for Good
We're donating Workplace to charities around the world, helping improve diversity, strengthen teams, build internal communication and collaboration.
Be nimble
AKA: How using technology can help you focus on solving your most pressing problems (rather than building for the sake of it)
Charities don't carry the same heavy administrative functions as many businesses, and focus on their frontline delivery. This leaves them more free to test and learn new approaches in technologies at the forefront of the future of work
Take the World Health Organization (WHO), for example, who during the COVID epidemic found that using an augmented reality (AR) approach was an essential way to help global staff approach a critical personal safety issue. Take a look.
The AR personal protective equipment (PPE) course is a 20-minute augmented reality learning experience available through the WHO mobile app.
It demonstrated and tested health workers on the proper procedures for putting on and taking off their PPE, with the help of a virtual nurse demonstrating proper technique.
The WHO Academy is a new division and state-of-the-art learning centre within the World Health Organisation, with ambitious goals for the use of immersive technologies. Its goal is to improve the speed, efficiency and effectiveness with which information and training is delivered to health workers, public health officials, policymakers and others.
Linking company comms with employee engagement
AKA: Build your technology strategy around your people strategy, not the other way around.
The move to remote working during global lockdowns forced many organisations to rethink their approach to company communications. It also placed a greater focus on the link between internal comms best practices and other important issues, such as employee engagement, morale and overall experience.
Like at The Home Group, for example, who built a comms strategy using Workplace that was built around employee needs and outcomes and that bridged the gap between remote workers during lockdowns (and between hybrid workers afterwards).
"The impact of COVID-19 meant that we needed to shift our strategic goals, and our internal communication strategy was based on business needs identified by our COVID-19 response team", a spokesperson for the UK-based housing charity told us.
"Our objective was to maintain coworker morale and well-being. We identified that the pandemic split our coworker and customer base into two key audiences, and maintaining coworker morale in an incredibly challenging situation would be crucial."
Their approach was to anchor employee morale in a clearly defined programme of internal communications. The plan covered the following stages:
Consistent messaging
Regular daily/weekly updates
Increased executive visibility
Open, two-way communication
The results speak for themselves. The metric that they cared about was "Trust" as measured by the annual Great Place to Work survey. Between the 2020 and 2021 survey, Home Group achieved a 6% boost to the "Trust" metric by executing their Workplace comms plan.1 It will be exciting to see how this measure continues in the coming years.
