A day at the virtual office

I’m laughing out loud with a bunch of cartoonish figures wearing cowboy hats and bunny ears. For the past 90 minutes, we’ve been shooting digital basketballs into virtual hoops, protecting a cyber castle and wounding each other with computerised paint. When the “team engagement” session with Mavrck, a Boston-based marketing platform that works with influencers, eventually winds down, I find myself wondering: this can’t be the future of work, can it?

Mavrck recently acquired a Canadian start-up, Later, and the virtual world I’ve been experiencing is part of its attempt to merge the two work cultures. The metaverse not only provides an informal setting for a staff away day but it also saves on the need for international flights and hotels. Instead Mavrck sent nearly 350 virtual-reality headsets to all its employees, spanning a dozen cities on two continents.

Managers quietly orchestrated things so that future colleagues who hadn’t met are placed side by side. They start chatting and playing bar sports games while waiting for the main session to begin. “We’re trying to engage our people without doing another Zoom call,” says Chicka Elloy, Mavrck’s vice-president of people experience.

Once we’ve got used to our virtual surroundings, the real business begins as all 350 of us are transported to a castle and equipped with bows and arrows to defend our turf from orcs and fire-breathing dragons. If it sounds silly, well, it is. But the level of immersion the game generates proves captivating. “Games work so well because there’s other stuff to do than just talking,” says Brian Hamilton, a Mavrck employee. “And it’s really cool to move around and be like, ‘Oh hey, there’s Alexander.’”

This will come as no surprise to Remio, the San Francisco-based company that’s facilitating today’s action by providing a VR HQ. It aims to design games in such a way that teamwork and communication are essential. In a capture-the-flag paintball excursion, for instance, players can come back to life instantly if a teammate high-fives them. My zero score in this regard subtly shames me into abandoning my “shoot first, ask questions later” mindset and adopting a more considered approach.

Remio’s internal research suggests that teams that bond in the virtual world extend this back to the office. Elloy insists Mavrck’s teams got a kick out of their CEO attaining the top score in paintball, as it showed he had earned his chops.

Elsewhere, some interactive scenarios are designed to be more serious. In California, for instance, firefighters have for years been donning headsets to help them work as a team, understand the physics of wildfires and cut back on potential dangers like inhaling carcinogens.

As remote work becomes increasingly normal, shared virtual experiences are growing common. Remio already has clients that hold their weekly meetings in a virtual world, followed by some competitive games. Its CEO Jos van der Westhuizen doesn’t claim that virtual paintball is better than the real thing, but it is more accessible, easier to set up and can save money. His prediction for the future: “Companies will still do an annual off-site, but they’ll augment with three other VR off-site, company-wide events.”

As companies recognise the value in being able to communicate at scale with employees, many are making use of VR for training. One leading platform in this area is Strivr, which started in 2015 as a way to train college football teams but found its trajectory dramatically altered the following year when it got a call from Walmart, the world’s largest employer. It wanted to create a training experience that could be consistent across thousands of stores.

“Imagine you’re a big company and you’ve got 1,500 people that go around and train workers,” says Strivr CEO Derek Belch. “It’s just human nature that each person is training them in a different way. This is now a consistent, repeatable way to give the same training every time.”

Since then, Strivr has worked with the airline JetBlue and Bank of America. Laura Lee, former chief human resources officer at MGM Resorts International, says there’s a simple reason VR training works: “The best way you learn, in hospitality, is by doing.”

Much of what Strivr does is create digital content that displaces the need for, say, Walmart to travel the country teaching classes at its 5,000 stores. But it also creates novel training grounds with little real-world equivalent. With Verizon, for instance, it created an active shooter training module that prepares employees how to act in the event of a store robbery. “You get a gun pointed at your face and someone is cussing at you,” explains Belch. “It’s all about that emotional preparedness.” Employees who have undergone it describe the virtual training as, paradoxically, among the most visceral, real experiences they’ve ever had.

Patrick McGee is the FT’s San Francisco correspondent

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