Celebrating New Year’s in the Metaverse as the new form of team building for remote teams

While I am building Techville — the metaverse for learning languages, I wanted to show my English For IT’s team what the metaverse is and how we can use it in class. English For IT is an edtech startup that I solo founded 5 years ago. At English For IT we help tech professionals worldwide improve their English and soft skills.

In this article, I’d like to share some of my perspective on the Metaverse trend. I know you’re probably already tired of hearing about it. But how about taking a behind-the-scenes look at our team’s actual experience in the Metaverse? Yes, we have no shame about jumping on bandwagons as long as it means going beyond your regular company Zoom happy hour. Speaking of jumping on bandwagons, we have also rolled out our first series of NFTs. More on that later!

The Metaverse is a virtual world which mirrors the real world. In other words, all of our online experiences can be considered part of the Metaverse.

The definition is still quite blurry but the important fact is that now due to the pandemic people have started considering alternative ways of interacting online. This has led to the creation of virtual worlds where one can buy virtual land like in Decentraland or a world-famous sight like in Superworld or virtual clothes like in DressX.

To me, the Metaverse provides an opportunity to connect the physical world with the virtual world to get maximum value. Imagine waking up on a Saturday morning and being at an arts exhibition 5 minutes later. That’s exactly what I did one day in Spatial.

The coolest thing about the Metaverse is the chance to conquer an uncharted territory and build the next big thing. The goal of all Metaverse product creators right now is to come up with brand new ideas and execute on them.

Now that I’ve given you an overview of our Metaverse vision, let’s get to the most interesting part — how the English For IT team celebrated 2022.

If you follow me on Instagram, you will have known that I’ve been in the US for the past 6 months (currently based in Miami). Our team is remote only. We have people from all over the world: Ukraine, Russia, Vietnam, Ireland, South Africa, USA, Switzerland, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Spain.

That’s why the only (certainly the easiest) place for us to get together is the Metaverse.

Our previous New Year’s party was held over Zoom but this year we have decided to kill two birds with one stone and let our team experience the Metaverse first hand. After all, we need to keep up with the tech industry trends so that we can be on the same page with our students if not a step ahead (we also love to share interesting news and tidbits our students have not yet heard of).

As for logistics: we first picked a platform and created our space. We decided to go with Spatial. The preparations for the party were a fascinating experience in and of itself as our HR team was dipping their toes into the Metaverse for the very first time. Our team had a lot of fun creating their virtual avatars and we were all surprised they came out looking so much like us! Everything else had to be also built from scratch. Check out the space we’ve created and let us know what you think!

We shared knowledge, played games, drank champagne, and danced. Yep, turns out you can do all those things in the Metaverse including dancing, clapping and reacting with hearts.

The highlight of the party however was a special English4IT NFTs giveaway for the team. Check out our cool nerd kittens:

All in all, it was a fascinating and somewhat weird experience. The Metaverse made it possible for us to connect, have dance-offs, look at photos and talk about our achievements for 2021 in one place as a team. Metaverse. Connecting people :) Check out this video to feel the vibe.

By the way, we are planning Metaverse English classes and are gradually introducing this idea to our students. English For IT is on its way to becoming even more innovative than before!

English For IT community appreciated such an innovative event. They even said that we are ahead of some tech companies.

More news on my cutting-edge web3 project Techville and the Metaverse will follow soon in my next article.