Companies are rolling out virtual offices in which you can enjoy small talk and stilted run-ins with your co-workers
Photo: Getty Images I worked from home even before social-distancing restrictions were put in place, but it is my understanding that several people — thousands, possibly — enjoy aspects of going into an office that they now dearly miss. Much of this reasoning makes perfect sense. People want a firm, physical divide between work and personal life.
And yet that’s what several tech ventures are trying to build for the newly minted stay-at-home workforce. The Wall Street Journal reports that companies are rolling out “SimCity-like simulations” of office spaces that they can access online. One of these companies, a file-transfer service called WeTransfer B.V., welcomed its employees into its virtual office on May 1, about seven weeks after it was ordered to close its brick-and-mortars in New York, Los Angeles, and Amsterdam.
Tech companies building these platforms for other workplaces include Sine Wave Entertainment, Ltd., which released Breakroom last month. The “virtual-world product” hosts group meetings, one-on-ones, and document sharing. An Italian energy company called Enel Spa has been working on a platform in the same vein, “combining augmented reality with virtual reality.
WeTransfer’s chief executive officer Gordon Willoughby posits that WeTransfer’s new virtual office is no different from Zoom conference calls or Slack: a means of reformatting office communication for the digital space. Apparently with more companies considering letting some employees work from home after social-distancing restrictions ease, “some employers worry about losing positive elements of the workplace, such as the serendipity of in-person interactions.
It’s true that most offices can’t function without communication, but adopting a work avatar to have serendipitous experiences with the avatars of colleagues while one’s manager looks on through the eyes of a cartoon penguin feels less needed.
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