Month: July 2021

Core skills that help people progress at work and improve productivity, such as critical thinking, teamwork, presenting effectively and even demonstrating a clear work ethic could all need a boost.

Susy Roberts is founder of international people development consultancy Hunter Roberts, and she has identified problem-solving and fast thinking as two skills that will need attention. 

“These both require high levels of cognitive and execution function,” she said. “Many soft skills have been drained by loneliness, long COVID and grief. Leaders will need to show high levels of empathy and accept that allowances will have to be made.”

She added that communicating and collaborating face-to-face will take a lot of getting used to. “The mental effort required to be around people when you are not used to it is quite exhausting.”

Associate insight director at U.S. and U.K.-based employee behavioral experts Canvas8, Helen Jambunathan, agreed that bosses must make allowances for those who will need extra help reconnecting and empathizing with others.

“‘Compassion fatigue’ which can result in a lack of empathy was mentioned a lot during the pandemic. It has not gone away completely — it’s just had to change shape. The return to real-life interactions will make empathizing with each other easier,” said Jambunathan.

She cited how soft skills around areas such as body language will need to be addressed as people move from a virtual-only world and start meeting clients and senior colleagues face-to-face again.

“This will be a key part of adjusting to in-person interaction,” she said. “On Zoom, we’ve been using purely verbal and facial cues, but when returning to the office, we suddenly have much more information to work with.” 

Some believe that less reliance on body language was one reason video calls felt so jarring initially. “In-person meetings where you know that someone is looking at you and you are responding accordingly with your body will help people to read the room better.”

Heath Podvesker, general manager at New York-based marketing analytics company Adverity, has identified a few interpersonal skills that will need a boost. These include an ability to solve in-person conflicts and delivering face-to-face presentations.

“It will be draining to build new routines and adapt behaviors once again,” he said. “Team-building exercises will be important for repairing companies’ cultural and social fabric, while also providing valuable benefit to mental health.”

He urged employers to be flexible, patient and understanding. Adverity has shown its intention to support staff by investing in a wellness coach.

One mental health tool popular in the U.K. and part of the National Health Service’s apps library is called Companion. It was inspired by Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and aims to reduce work-related worries. It was co-founded by psychologist and behavioural expert Dr. Robin Hart, and he has some top tips as people return to the workplace.

These include remembering how much communication in the office is visual in terms of someone’s body language, accepting it might take time for in-office productivity to pick up, and even encouraging employees to adjust their sleep routine after 18 months as they embrace commuting again.

“When it comes to personal skills and habits, organizations should reflect on what they have learned as a business while working remotely and try to keep the things that work well,” he said. “For example, people might feel better if some meetings were held permanently online and they are given time at home to catch up on administration.”

Rusty social skills will also need to be refreshed as people deal with awkward questions around co-worker health, hygiene — and vaccinations. Newer workers who have never met their colleagues in person could lack confidence in their soft skills.

Communications agency Clarity has offices in the U.S., the UK and in the Netherlands and global head of people and culture Jody Johnson is confident that employees’ soft skills will come back naturally. Staff just need to be encouraged to bring their personalities as well as their professional insights back to the office.

“You need today’s office environment to allow each person to show up as their whole self,” she said. “This could be through presentations or small talk where people will be a bit rusty. You need a nurturing and inclusive workplace and culture.”

3 Questions with Jikku Venkat, CEO of infectious- disease management platform ReturnSafe 

What are the core factors employers must consider when planning workforce returns? 

Employers need to consider two important issues that are top of mind for employees returning to in-person work: flexibility and health and safety. When it comes the latter, the pandemic has brought health-related concerns to the forefront, especially the risk of infection in the workplace. So employers must consider two core factors when bringing employees back to work: most leaders will be dealing with a mixed immunity population, and poorly strategized in-person returns make workers especially vulnerable to the Delta variant. Most businesses aren’t mandating vaccines, which means that some teammates will be immunized, and others won’t. Because Delta has the potential to spread among unvaccinated populations, employers who aren’t requiring the vaccine will need to treat Delta as an active, ongoing threat in their workplace and plan accordingly. Without accepting these two factors, employers both put their employees at risk and create conditions for further closure or a return to isolated work environments.

What protocols should they follow to keep on top of health and safety in workplaces, with unvaccinated and vaccinated staff? 

To combat the threats associated with mixed-immunity populations, the first thing employers need to do is log who has and has not received a vaccine. With this information in mind, employers can better monitor who needs to continue wearing masks and abide by social distancing protocols. Additionally, employers should consider implementing routine testing, contact tracing and quarantine measures. Testing is now widely available and inexpensive. It is a great way to stop silent spread across the organization. By keeping track of who comes in contact with whom, positive tests can result in fast, surgical quarantining to ensure that outbreaks don’t spread across an entire workplace.

What will be the biggest challenges in maintaining this? 

These health safety strategies require the collection of a lot of information, which can be a challenge for organizations who don’t want to store employee health-related data. One way to handle this burden is to create a safety-specific role or partner with a secure outside organization. This option has a price tag, but the cost of planning ahead outweighs the potential loss of lives, business closure or return to remote work.

By the numbers:

• 48% of 1,010 employees surveyed, feel some level of anxiety when requesting time off, while employees with unlimited PTO feel the most out-of-office anxiety. 
  [Source of data: Skynova’s Out of Office Anxiety study.]
• 51% of 996 millennial employees (in a total survey of 2391 respondents) are worried about future job prospects, but 63% of those would quit their jobs if employer values do not align with their own.
  [Source of data: Atlassian’s Return on Action report.]
• 69% of 275 executives polled said they expect overall travel budgets to be reduced to at least 75% of pre-pandemic levels in 2022.
  [Source of data: Deloitte’s Return to the Workplace survey.]

What else we’ve covered

• With employee well-being top of mind for employers, many are incorporating fitness programs and studios into their offices as an additional perk and to encourage those who may not want to return.
• With remote working becoming a way of life, and the acceptance of communicating over online communication tools such as Slack and Zoom, working from overseas is set to become even more popular, and no longer confined to digital nomads traveling for months on end.
• While TikTok Resumes has been embraced by many candidates and businesses as a useful recruitment tool, the pilot has caused some HR execs to worry that it will inadvertently inflame unconscious bias.
• There is nothing more emotive than a favorite song or album, and they can get us through both happy and tough times. We asked executives from the ad industry which three tracks helped buoy them through difficult moments during lockdowns.

  This email briefing is edited by Jessica Davies, managing editor, Future of Work.

Using a desktop computer located in New York State, Digiday visited sites belonging to the media properties in the Comscore 50. It omitted sites which require a log-in to be used effectively, such as Facebook or LinkedIn. In cases of entities that own or manage ad inventory for large numbers of properties, such as Mediavine or CafeMedia, Digiday examined their largest sites by traffic. The data was collected in July 2021. 

The data is not representative of the experience that every American internet user will have. A number of different U.S. states, including California, Maine and Washington, have already passed their own digital consumer privacy laws, and several more state legislatures are considering their own. By 2023, about two thirds of the U.S. population will be covered by a patchwork of different state privacy laws. 

Yet even with those changes looming, you wouldn’t know it from looking at top sites. 

That picture contrasts with what those same sites are doing in Europe, where regulations require site owners to operate differently; when Digiday used a virtual private network to visit the same sites using an IP address located in the United Kingdom, most all of the sites Digiday examined had a privacy notice and popup. 

Yet those sites don’t make it easy to opt out of tracking. Just 11% of the sites Digiday examined offered visitors a one-click way to opt out of tracking. More than 60% of them had policies of implied consent, meaning that site users who did not configure their privacy settings or explicitly opt out were automatically giving the sites permission to continue gathering data on them. 

The site visitors who were savvy enough to engage with the sites’ consent management tools weren’t given an easy path to opting out either. Just 15% of the sites immediately gave people an opportunity to opt out after choosing to “manage” their settings. 

“All the trappings of big agencies have gone away” in the pandemic, said Wil Boudreau, who runs his own agency/consultancy, Boudreau Advertising. “That’s an opportunity for me. It’s a classic marketing jiu jitsu move to turn a weakness into a strength.”

To market themselves over the last 18 months, agencies have advertised on digital banners on LinkedIn, Facebook and other social platforms, promoted their executives via sponsorship and speaking opportunities at industry events, executed paid search campaigns, placed thought leadership pieces in publications and outlets, bought trade ad campaigns — and even launched their own podcasts.

Milwaukee-based full-service shop Hanson Dodge applies the same rigor to its advertising that it would for any client, said its president Stacie Boney. “We have our own media in-house so we could handle everything: media, creative, production, etc.,” said Boney. “We also used some of the capacity we had during the downturn — we took the PPP loan and didn’t let anyone go. And the shoemaker’s children finally got some shoes.”

John Harris, president and CEO of Worldwide Partners, a global network of independent agencies, agreed with that approach. “Those agencies marketing effectively treat themselves as a client,” he said. Harris noted four steps to take: 1. Define your value proposition 2. Define your target audience 3. Develop your marketing plan and 4. Deliver on the customer experience you’re selling.

Harris also believes now is the time for independent agencies to get serious about advertising themselves, because he senses an opportunity against what he sees as cookie-cutter execution among major agencies. “Clients are turning more toward independents and away from holding company agencies because we’re more agile,” he said.

Dan Eisenberg, senior vp of marketing and business development at digital/shopper marketing/creative independent Blue Chip, described an effort that went heavily into thought leadership through paid partnerships with the ANA and the Path to Purchase Institute. Just last week, minutes after two of Eisenberg’s colleagues presented at the ANA Digital and Social Media conference, he said a major consumer packaged goods prospect in the audience reached out to set an informational meeting. “Forty percent of our new-business opportunities are inbound requests, many of which saw our marketing,” he said.  

Besides discovering the value of interconnectedness on LinkedIn, Boudreau also launched his own podcast, The Many Meanderings of the First Gen X Man, which blends his own personal experiences with stories from his advertising career, including making a pizza ad with Donald Trump many years ago.

“As a creative and a storyteller, it’s a stealth way of promoting my abilities,” said Boudreau. “When you start up an agency such as mine, you need news, but I don’t have a steady flow of it. This lets me have effectively news about me come out that I’m generating myself.”

Over the past year, executives and creatives in the gaming and tech industries have breathed new life into the Metaverse concept, framing massively multiplayer games such as “Fortnite: Battle Royale,” “Roblox” and “Minecraft” as precursors to an expansive digital world that combines Stephenson’s fictional Metaverse with a real world that has become increasingly digitized during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In an interview with The Verge last week, Mark Zuckerberg turned heads by opining that Facebook would transition from being a social media company to “a Metaverse company” within the next five years.

“It’s probably fair to say that what we have today is not quite the Metaverse yet,” said Moritz Baier-Lentz, a partner at Metaverse-minded venture capital fund BITKRAFT Ventures. “But when you ask people to describe the Metaverse, most would converge on something that is the stuff of ‘Ready Player One’: a persistent bridge between the physical and digital worlds with unprecedented scale, interactivity and interoperability.”

With so many different interpretations of the Metaverse going around, here’s a primer on what it is in its purest form — and why it has everyone excited, from Roblox to AB InBev.

What is the Metaverse?

The Metaverse is a “successor state” to the modern internet, with all the same content but fewer limitations as to where and how that content can be accessed. Current online platforms allow users to move about somewhat freely within the confines of specific services, but limit interoperability between platforms: you can build anything in “Minecraft,” but you can’t transfer your creations into a “Fortnite” map. The Metaverse will allow users to generate their own content and distribute it freely throughout a widely accessible digital world.

Unlike the modern internet, Metaverse users will experience changes in real-time by all users. If a user makes any kind of change to the Metaverse, that change will be permanent and immediately visible to everyone else. The persistence and interoperability of the Metaverse will afford users increased continuity of identity and experience compared to the modern internet. In the Metaverse, users won’t need to have separate Twitter profiles, “Fortnite” characters and Reddit accounts — they’ll simply be themselves across all channels. This continuity of identity will be a core factor behind how users purchase and consume content in the Metaverse.

“The brands that are progressive in this area are the ones that understand the fact that self-expression is such an important component of why people spend so much time online,” said Christina Wootton, vp of brand partnerships at Roblox. “They can be who they want to be.”

Why are video games viewed as precursors to the Metaverse?

BITKRAFT, a venture capital fund that invests in game developers and Metaverse-focused technologies, describes the Metaverse as the product of a growing “synthetic reality” — the increased convergence of the physical and digital worlds that only accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. But gamers had already been socializing and creating content primarily on the web. “What excites us about investing in gaming, esports and interactive media is that games are essentially a spearhead of that broader trend,” Baier-Lentz said. “There are many examples in which innovations that were originally developed for gaming use cases have triggered far-reaching innovations, not just across the media ecosystem, but really across technology as a whole.” He pointed to graph cards as an example — once developed for 3D calculations in games before becoming a backbone for artificial intelligence, among other technologies.

Video games such as “Fortnite” and “Roblox” showcase a kind of cultural interoperability that would be widespread in the Metaverse. For example, in a single game, players dressed up as Lebron James can battle against others using the guise of comic book characters like Deadpool or the Joker. Furthermore, the multiplayer experience of these games suggests the real-time continuity of experience offered by the Metaverse. Last year’s “Fortnite” Travis Scott concert allowed over 12 million players across the world to attend the same concert in real-time, though they were limited to interacting with up to only 49 other users in any given “room” of the experience. This successful event sparked a trend in “Fortnite” and, thus, the Metaverse. Last month, marketers took the concept a step further by recreating London’s O2 Arena in-game ahead of a concert featuring British band easy life.

How close are we to a true Metaverse?

There are still quite a few hurdles on the pathway toward a bona fide Metaverse. The biggest roadblocks are hardware limitations: at the moment, worldwide networking and computing capabilities are not yet capable of supporting a persistent digital world that can be experienced in real-time by millions of concurrent users. Even if this level of networking and computing power was available, the energy consumption of such an endeavor would create problems for both national power grids and the environment.

In cases where the technology is sufficient, broad cultural changes are necessary to spur the development of a true Metaverse. Relatively high-quality virtual reality and augmented reality technologies are already available to consumers, but less than 20 percent of Americans have taken VR headsets for a whirl, according to a 2020 report by Thrive Analytics and ARtillery Intelligence.

Though that’s likely to change: Baier-Lentz predicted VR and AR head-mounted devices have “a good shot” at surpassing gaming consoles as early as 2025.

Aside from technological limitations, what is the biggest challenge to the Metaverse?

Interoperability. Right now, even so-called Metaverse precursors such as “Fortnite” do not allow players to recreate their own user-generated content (UGC) on other platforms. To allow for true interoperability between platforms, the corporations that own these platforms must relinquish some control over their player bases’ content and user experience. This process is already underway. Sony, a notorious holdout against cross-platform play, recently moved to allow PlayStation users to more frequently interact with players on other consoles.

Shahar Sorek, CMO of Overwolf, an all-in-one UGC platform, believes that this relinquishing of control is inevitable because UGC (as opposed to developer-created content) is rapidly becoming a central aspect of the modern gaming experience. “Unlike the banks or any other centralized system, there is an experience that is shared with a community, and how the community reacts to that experience is at the core of what drives engagement,” Sorek said. “So a game maker, if they see their community is all about creating content, they have to change, because they understand that if they don’t, a competitor will come along.”

Why is blockchain technology important for the Metaverse?

“I’m hopeful that the future, as we lay it out, will be one that is truly decentralized and in the hands of the users as its citizens,” Baier-Lentz said. “By far the best, and maybe the only solution that we have for something like that today is blockchain technology and applications built on the Web3.”

Without the oversight of a Metaversal government or other regulatory body, blockchain technology would ensure that transactions and identities in the Metaverse are safe and public. Furthermore, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) would allow users in the Metaverse to own unique and bespoke items, much like in the real world, and cryptocurrencies provide a roadmap for how a Metaversal economy might take shape. The creation of this Metaversal economy is already underway: some companies, such as AB InBev, have already begun auctioning off limited-edition branded NFTs for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

According to Sorek, the currency of the Metaverse will likely be something between modern cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum and the V-Bucks of “Fortnite.” “Perhaps each game maker would offer a token that you buy just like V-Bucks,” Sorek said. “They would have their own exchange, and you could cash out from one to the other.”

Is the Metaverse inevitable?

Probably, though its future users might simply know it as the internet. At no point will a flip be switched to turn on the Metaverse — rather, the Metaverse will come about gradually, as cultural changes and technological upgrades give internet users the ability to move increasingly freely and more easily create and share bespoke content on the web. Just as no formal change marked the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, the development of the Metaverse will occur naturally as people spend more time online and tie more of their identities to their digital lives.

Though “Fortnite” and “Roblox” are often described as precursors to the Metaverse, the most significant precursor to the Metaverse is the internet itself. But if the internet is a video tour of the apartment, giving brief glimpses into each room in a defined sequence, the Metaverse would be the apartment itself. We might not be living there yet, but we’ve already signed the lease.