Sprucing Up Your Virtual Space is not Merely Aesthetics
How do you harness the catalytic power of creativity and collaboration to increase engagement and psychological safety within your organizations?
While offices have opened up and travel is exceeding the normal pre-pandemic numbers, virtual events and collaboration are here to stay. Contrary to popular belief, engaging virtual events are not only for family and friends, they are becoming an excellent platform to build connections and psychological safety within an organization.
Our team at LIVEsciences have been working with organizations in designing virtual experiences for teams to communicate information to a larger audience (from 30 — to 3000), located from different parts of the world. Here’s why we believe it’s crucial to compliment face-to-face interactions with creative virtual collaborations.
IT IS MORE INCLUSIVE THAN YOU THINK
Virtual meetings, and especially the ones that are designed with the introverts in mind, have proven that there is a voice for everybody. Whether it is in spoken or written form, every expression is welcome. One can argue about the efficiency and depth of face to face interactions, however, our observations show that on the flipside, certain activities can be more efficiently replaced with good virtual facilitation, disciplined timeboxing of interactions, small group conversations that invite people to share their thoughts and reflections. The most engaging virtual meetings often have creative visuals and highly energy experience design and approaches that fosters openness and a sense of belonging.
IT KEEPS SUSTAINABILITY IN CHECK
Studies show that during the pandemic, daily global CO2 emissions decreased by -17%. This is no small feat and while the demand for travel has increased in the recent weeks, virtual events have significantly changed organizations’ travel patterns, leaning more towards virtual meetings. The need has significantly reduced for people to travel long distances for a 2 hour meeting and not only save organizations a few hundreds of dollars on flights and hotel expenses, but also reduce carbon footprint that is essential for the company’s sustainability targets. As technology has evolved, face to face workshops replaced by a decently curated online environment and a well facilitated interaction have proven to simulate the experience and evoke a sense of inclusivity far beyond what we have imagined possible.
IT BREAKS THE GEOGRAPHICAL LIMITS OF TALENT POTENTIAL
One of the gifts of the pandemic is that new opportunities have opened up for local talent to impact global organizational vision. The reality of remote work is still a challenge in some areas, however, more and more organizations are opening up to the possibility that by decentralizing global roles from the headquarters to the affiliate offices, it has opened up access to a large internal talent pool that can be developed to serve its business ambitions. In a similar fashion, the virtual space has opened up opportunities for regionally located teams to collaborate across boundaries.
These are some of the positive effects of virtual collaboration. It is definitely a feat that humanity has reached, but it is far from utopia. The virtual space has been significantly accelerating its evolution with technology as of late with concepts like Web3.0 and metaverse becoming mainstream. And for this, new opportunities have opened up for organizations and the amazing humans that are thriving within them.
#humanresources #management #virtualexperience #futureofwork
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
