Can VR cure Home Office Syndrome?
VR might help with the negative side-effects of working from home
Working from home offers a lot of freedom, but can be quite challenging as well. Scientists have even coined a term for it: “Home Office Syndrom”.
Chris Krauß, Senior Product Manager for Immersive Technologies at Axel Springer National Media & Tech GmbH (short: NMT), has a possible remedy: VR meetings.
Chris has led numerous innovation projects before and is currently testing immersive virtual meetings with nine teams of NMT from Berlin and Hamburg for their daily business.
A Virtual Journey
Picture this: You are standing on a beach, looking over the clear blue ocean. The waves are coming in and with them that soothing feeling that the gentle sound of water and a light sea breeze always bring along. You walk around a little and already feel refreshed and energized. There is nothing that is distracting you but the curiosity of exploring that place.
Chris led me onto a journey as soon as I put on the VR Headset. I forgot about the fairly heavy and cumbersome glasses that I was wearing within seconds. I also forgot about the office we were actually standing in and about the other colleagues around me, since part of the gadget were integrated noise cancelling headphones. At first, I felt insecure because I could not see or hear the real world anymore. But it only took a few moments until I was fine with the other reality — the virtual reality — that I could now see and hear.
No need to say, that we weren’t in it for a beach day, but that is a rather tempting feature of the hosting software glue. Many of glue’ s other features were business oriented, as Chris would show me later.
GLUE was benchmarked against the others players in the market in categories as avatars, intuitive user experience, pricing, business features and how well it would integrate with existing tools. Chris decided on working with glue among other aspects mainly for its smooth rendering, which helped users feel the most comfortable in that virtual space.
VR Remote Work
As someone who is always interested in equipping the work place with cutting edge technology and looking into the most high-tech trends Chris was flirting with the idea of introducing VR to Axel Springer for a long time. Even before the pandemic he saw the many appealing advantages to VR as a better way to engage with each other. “It’s essentially another aspect of new work to bring teams together in a playful yet highly productive way”, he says.
With everyone urged to work remotely and to limit their in-person meetings to a minimum, teams feel increasingly disconnected from each other. Another negative side-effect of working from home is the level of distraction. It is simply harder to focus on work, when one is sitting next to a pile of laundry that needs to be done, a child, partner or roommate who needs attention or a dog that won’t stop giving you a stare-down with it’s irresistible puppy-eyes.
Chris saw a clear solution for the problems of isolation and missing focus with introducing VR as a new way of working together while being physically apart.
VR Meetings
Meetings in VR are probably hard to imagine but since the pandemic most VR companies have been rapidly improving their products for business use. Today VR meetings can make use of a virtual Kanban board, whiteboards, sticky notes and images & videos that can be added prior to the meeting.
So, let’s say that your agile coach wants to prepare a retro — in that case they can actually create a virtual meeting room from scratch, add the appropriate virtual whiteboards, and perhaps a screenshot of the team’s burndown chart. The virtual workspaces can also be personalized by uploaded pictures and other add-ons to make the users feel comfortable during their stay there.
Also: Nobody ever has to wipe any whiteboards down — after a meeting is done, the virtual room that was created can just remain open as a meeting documentation. A fresh, completely custom room for every meeting — imagine that in the real world!
VR Benefits
If that sounds exciting to you, you are not alone. The initially planned test with three teams actually ended up involving nine different teams testing out working with VR. The excitement around this was huge — everyone wanted to get involved.
Chris introduced me to Alexander Kuhn, who works in Production Engineering at NMT and Michael Adomeit, who works as a Product Owner for Mediasites. Both are testing the virtual collaboration with their teams.
At this point, the feedback is even more positive than expected. Most testing teams share a similar perspective on the project: Working within the virtual office is surprisingly intuitive. It is easy to use, it has a playful angle and gets people excited.
Making 2020 fun with VR
“Being all isolated at the home office led to the fact that we lost touch with each other as a team. The VR definitely reconnected us”, explains Michael from the Mediasites team. The team thinks there could not have been a better timing to test virtual meetings than this year.
Alex compliments, that it might have just improved the way their teams work together. Being isolated through the VR setup effectively blocks out the many distractions when working from home (such as the staring dog or that pile of laundry). The team works more concentrated with each other during meetings in the VR. The immersion of collaborating virtually is leading to a better focus.
The virtual environment even leads to unusual participation of individual team members. Michael has noticed a hugely positive impact on some of his usually rather shy colleagues. Teammates who would regularly get nervous presenting something internally to the team, were noticeably more active in the VR environment during review meetings.
VR Use Cases
The testing teams have been holding their reviews, retros and plannings in the virtual office for the duration of the test period. But they have figured out that whether a meeting should take place in the VR or not depends on the type and complexity of the meeting. Michaels team found for example that their refinements and backlog grooming work better without the glasses on.
Dailies and workshops on the other hand work really well within the VR.
“Techteams definitely respond to the experiment better”, Chris can conclude at this point. Every week the participants volunteer in a survey. For tech-related use cases, where meetings need documentation and preparations VR is adding many benefits. It offers meeting spaces with a persistency layer built into it.
For non-tech teams the VR can be too much overhead. A marketing or editorial team for example focuses on the communicative dimension in their meetings rather than utilizing tools and meeting rituals. Adding an extra layer of complexity by moving these sorts of meetings into the VR is unnecessary.
VR Get-Togethers
Apart from the innovations regarding new work, VR is also opening up new networking possibilities. Even teams that would not necessarily meet at the office can now come together. Especially in the face of the pandemic VR can open up novel ways to socialize during lockdown. Teams can for example gather around a virtual bonfire or play a round of chess against each other in the virtual space.
At Axel Springer National Media & Tech — the unit Chris works for — there’s currently two other ideas for utilizing VR for remote-socializing.
The first idea is to support an already ongoing match-making program within NMT, aiming to connect people across team-boundaries. This week two of the teams participating in the test phase adapted this program and met each other in glue for a virtual get-together: team Mediasites in Berlin and Team Delivery for AutoBild/ComputerBild in Hamburg. “That was a fun experience for everybody”, Chris states, “and an event that clearly shows how extremely powerful VR can be when it comes to remote social interaction.”
The other idea is to replace the cancelled Christmas party this year with VR events. We’ll report back on that one late December.
VR for Future Work
Despite the common perception that VR might just be a toy, experimenting with the virtual office has shown that there is much more potential to this. Chris’s work has clearly shown that.
After the first testing phase, there will be a second round. Right now, Chris is initiating the second phase to do enough testing before eventually integrating VR permanently into our daily business.
In an ideal future scenario teams might choose to work with VR equipment or not, just like they already choose the laptops they work with. Especially at home this could bring a great new perspective to remote work.
If you are now curious about testing it out — once it is safe again to go back into the office — you can check out the VR station at our learning lab in the Axel Springer Headquarters in Berlin. There even without having your team signed up for the testing period you can experience the virtual reality. “Just pass by or book a slot online with Chris and he’ll let you (and your team) dive into that new world”, explains Anja Rädler, who works for the Learning Lab..
Connect to Chris:
Chris on LinkedIn
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