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Running a Business in the Metaverse: Virtual Services, For the Win
Published
9 months agoon
By
Neil Duncan
The metaverse is a network of the 3D world that can be accessed using a virtual reality headset. It is a virtual universe that offers unlimited possibilities. It is estimated that the metaverse would be an $800 million market by 2024. It is no wonder that top corporations are investing in it.
A question arises on how you can run a business in the metaverse. Virtual workplaces are already a reality, thanks to remote work. Virtual services such as virtual reception – including phone answering – like those provided by www.virtualreception.com.au can be offered as a precursor to running a business in the Metaverse.
Remote Work and Virtual Services
Remote work is a powerful concept that allows people to work from anywhere. They no longer need to be physically present at an office to work. They can work from home or anywhere else. A question that arises is – what about a virtual office?
At present, virtual workers work from some corner of the home. This may even change from time to time. The metaverse now makes it possible to have an infinite office that has 3 types of virtual workspaces.
1. Private virtual office
With virtual reality headsets on, you can enter your private virtual office where you do your work. You can define your virtual surrounding while being able to see the physical world around you. Productivity tools can be used directly from the virtual office.
Let’s assume you need to attend a virtual meeting. With a tap of the screen, you can open the virtual meeting app and continue the meeting from your virtual office. This is the reality that seeks to transform the way we work.
2. Shared workspace
Some people find it difficult to remote work because they prefer working in a shared space with others. A close and collaborative shared workspace allows for greater productivity. Now, this can be done virtually using a shared virtual place. You can enter the shared space as a virtual avatar.
Sit in your own private office and be part of the shared workspace with others. Interact with them through your VR headset and watch the interaction in the virtual world. This is a great way to simulate an office space and ensure the best collaborative efforts.
3. The infinite office
The infinite office is a virtual office concept that goes to the next level. It takes your office just about anywhere, be it your home or even in a park. Just imagine, you are sitting on a park bench soaking in the warm sun and enjoying the pleasant weather. If you have a meeting scheduled in 5 minutes, you can continue it from the park.
All you need to do is use the VR headset to activate your virtual workspace right in front of you. You don’t even need a keyboard or a screen. You can activate work apps using a gesture. The infinite office is at a conceptual stage. But it won’t be long before it becomes a reality. When it does happen, it will truly take the world of work by storm. Working in the metaverse will become a reality.
Working in The Virtual World
The virtual world allows you to create a virtual avatar of yourself. Your virtual avatar will work in the shared space with others. An entire office can be created in the virtual world. This will allow you to get the best benefits of a virtual workplace with a real workplace. In fact, this has already become a reality.
A Korean company Zigbang has created a VR office spanning 30 floors and the avatars of employees can move around the office. As they encounter other avatars, their mike would be activated. They can then have a real conversation through the virtual world. This can make communication more effective. This was a drawback in remote working and with virtual communication enabled, the virtual workplace would be more effective.
Young people in workplaces would enjoy creating virtual avatars of themselves. They can allow their creativity to run amuck as they create an avatar of themselves. They can make the avatar look how they want it to be.
How Would The Metaverse be?
The metaverse is different from VR (Virtual Reality) and AR (Augmented Reality). There would be many changes that are significant. Devices like the mouse and keyboard would no longer be needed. Voice would be the main way in which communication happens. Voice instructions would help operate the metaverse.
The main feature of the metaverse is the use of virtual assistants. Virtual assistants would play an important role in the metaverse. Their primary interface would be a voice and not commands typed on the keyboard. People are ready to use voice today, thanks to Siri and Alexa. Voice commands are used on mobile phones and computers.
Voice search has become popular on Google with many people preferring speaking to Google rather than typing. Smart speakers have today become the norm. It is estimated that the smart speaker market would be worth more than $61 billion by 2024. The integration of smart speakers with Artificial Intelligence is making virtual assistants more useful.

Takeaway
In the virtual world of business, people would talk to virtual assistants using voice. Virtual assistants would have a major role to play in all types of businesses going forward.
It would be important to understand who or what a virtual assistant would be in the metaverse. A virtual assistant can be a software program or can even be a person who helps and guides users in the metaverse. The program can be AI-powered. When real people function as virtual assistants, they would be those who are skilled or specialized in the area of work.
The virtual assistant can make your life easy in the metaverse. They can help you keep track of your work and remind you of the things to do. They can even help you in your personal life with cooking, fitness tips, and even dating advice. Virtual personal trainers and virtual child care providers would be available to help you in the metaverse. These virtual assistants will be able to do more in the virtual world than in the real world.
Managing people
Designing Hospitals that Promote Staff Wellbeing
Published
10 months agoon
June 15, 2022By
Joan Saba
Even before Covid-19, rates of behavioral health illness were on the rise. In the third year of the pandemic, mental health has accelerated into a crisis, with health care workers in particular facing high levels of stress and burnout. Although mask mandates have been lifted and restrictions have been eased in many areas, caregivers are still in the throes of treating infected patients, while also coping with the fallout of the past two years. This convergence of factors has led to an uptick in mental health issues among health care workers, many of whom report experiencing record-high rates of anxiety and depression compared to the general population.
Previously, designing clinical spaces for well-being was focused primarily on the patient. Now, taking care of patients is table stakes; caring for the people who serve them is crucial to creating and maintaining a high-performing hospital system.
Designing buildings for the well-being of health care staff is not just necessary to curb the mental health crisis among the profession. It’s also critical to buttress the financial fallout that ensues with high turnover, preventing additional strain on a system already taxed from financial losses due to differed treatment during the pandemic.
During Covid, hospitals have seen increased rates of turnover among employees, which is both costly to morale and the bottom line. According to Becker’s Hospital Review, in 2020, the turnover rate for registered nurses increased 2.8 percentage points to 18.7% industry-wide. Each percentage point change translates to approximately $270,000 lost or saved per hospital.
These numbers have prompted hospitals to rethink their approach to the physical environment and incorporate research-based design strategies that improve well-being for both patients and the staff guiding their recovery. Below, we outline three lessons for designing hospitals and clinics based on current projects NBBJ is working on with Massachusetts General Hospital, Atrium Health, Loma Linda University Medical Center, and Montage Health.
Lesson 1: Employee mental health can be part of a building’s identity.
Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston is currently building a 482-bed expansion called Cambridge Street that focuses on staff and patient satisfaction, operational efficiency, and environmental stewardship. Several years ago, NBBJ also oversaw the creation of MGH’s 150-bed Lunder Building. Both facilities offer key insights into how seemingly simple design interventions can have a significant impact on the mental well-being of staff members.
It’s important to note that what we recommend are not amenities, even if some may call them that. Rather than focusing on the “nice to have” perks found in tech company headquarters, many of the spaces in MGH’s facility are “must haves” given the fact lives are on the line: stairwells flooded with light, deliberately quiet patient floors, and safer working conditions, for example.
The Lunder building offers plentiful access to daylight through a glass-encased stairwell used only by staff, who have adopted the corridor as a de facto meeting space (nicknamed the “stair conference room”). Staff also use this stairwell as a place to “be alone together” and report that they find comfort watching employees traverse the stairwell while they use the space to think and decompress.
The building further expands staff’s exposure to daylight — which impacts work-related stress and job satisfaction and is found to affect clinician burnout — through corridors that allow staff to access rooms from an exterior wall. Since less noise can reduce stress among caregivers and also help patients recover from illness, the Lunder building uses a variety of sound-absorbing materials and techniques to make the patient floors 35% quieter than typical health care buildings. Other features designed to minimize noise include sliding doors, distributing work zones for clinical staff across the floor rather than in a single location, and elevators and visitor waiting areas located away from patient rooms.
Finally, staff safety is perhaps the most critical “amenity” of all. For example, overexertion — in the form of repetitive routine physical tasks such as bending, stretching, and standing — account for 45.6% of all injuries occurring to nurses, according to a 2018 article published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. These injuries can result in musculoskeletal disorders such as sprains and strains that accounted for 8,730 days away from work among nurses in the private industry in 2016. Features such as motorized overhead patient ceiling lifts or full-height glass doors that provide greater situational awareness can help reduce injuries.
Designing buildings in this fashion makes a difference. For example, post-occupancy data from new inpatient units and staff work areas NBBJ designed for Atrium Health indicates that vast majority of employees feel safer and more at ease in the workplace. In the same post-occupancy evaluation, employees mentioned “the collaborative nature of the research floor,” “increased interaction with colleagues,” and “improved team collaboration” as positive aspects of the new building, further illustrating that opportunities for collaboration and interaction improve employee satisfaction.
Lesson 2: Design features can reduce stress in core working spaces.
Many hospitals are embracing support spaces that enable people to choose how they spend their precious break times. These spaces, both “offstage” (where staff can gather or be alone) and “onstage” (where caregivers see patients), allow staff to spend less time navigating a building and more time recharging.
Loma Linda University Medical Center’s expansion in Southern California boasts an open-core design. It features wide corridors, access to daylight, and the distribution of patient and supply rooms along the wings, which allows staff to connect better with each other and patients. In open-core hospitals, major support functions such as staff lockers, break rooms, and conference rooms are in a centralized hub that connects to patient wings along the exterior. This layout reduces the need for staff to travel between patient and supply rooms, the type of inefficient and repetitive physical tasks that can lead to burnout.
In addition to open-core designs, collaborative clinician rooms — such as the new examination rooms at MGH’s Cambridge Street project, which are sized to allow for multidisciplinary consults — reflect the evolving nature of medicine. Collaborative clinician spaces decrease the load on caregivers and their teams while also providing patients with a new, more effective way to navigate their medical journey.
In the future, these recharging spaces could take different forms, which would acknowledge that everyone refuels in a different way. For instance, because the availability of private spaces has been shown to reduce caregiver stress some hospitals are exploring restorative zones with nap areas for their staff that would be located close to the patient unit for ease of use.
Lesson 3: Good design is ultimately good for business.
Health systems such as Montage Health on the Monterey Peninsula are taking advantage of their less-densely-populated location by incorporating nature into the design of their buildings. For example, Montage’s Ohana Center’s garden-like environment and private patios for staff are designed to lower levels of arousal fatigue — the psychological exhaustion that results from sustained stimulation without breaks. Arousal fatigue is one of the key factors contributing to burnout among behavioral health caregivers, who have an annual turnover rate of 40%.
Other organizations are exploring solutions such as satellite food lockers, mobile ordering apps, and meal programs that offer discounts for nutritious food options. These types of design interventions are investments in staff longevity; they help to reduce stress and encourage positive lifestyle choices, ultimately supporting the mental and physical well-being of the people charged with helping others recuperate.
Behavioral health challenges existed before the pandemic and will persist after it’s over. Consequently, as health care systems navigate the lingering impacts of the pandemic, it’s more important than ever that they shift towards a more caregiver-centric mindset. Only by creating spaces and implementing solutions that promote staff well-being and patient healing at the same time can they effectively retain and recruit staff and reduce the financial impact of burnout and turnover. Designing buildings to enhance employees’ well-being will help keep them satisfied and productive.
Managing people
Stop Making the Business Case for Diversity
Published
10 months agoon
June 15, 2022
Eighty percent of Fortune 500 companies explain their interest in diversity by making some form of a business case: justifying diversity in the workplace on the grounds that it benefits companies’ bottom line. And yet, in a recent study, the authors found that this approach actually makes underrepresented job candidates a lot less interested in working with an organization. This is because rhetoric that makes the business case for diversity sends a subtle yet impactful signal that organizations view employees from underrepresented groups as a means to an end, ultimately undermining DEI efforts before employers have even had the chance to interact with potential employees. Based on their findings, the authors suggest that if organizations must justify their commitment to diversity, they should do so by making a fairness case — that is, an argument based in moral grounds — but to achieve the best results, they should consider not making any case at all. After all, companies don’t feel the need to explain why they believe in values such as innovation, resilience, or integrity. So why treat diversity any differently?
Most organizations don’t feel the need to explain why they care about core values such as innovation, resilience, or integrity. And yet when it comes to diversity, lengthy justifications of the value of hiring a diverse workforce have become the norm in corporate America and beyond. AstraZeneca’s website, for example, makes a business case for diversity, arguing that “innovation requires breakthrough ideas that only come from a diverse workforce.” Conversely, Tenet Healthcare makes a moral case, noting in its Code of Conduct that “We embrace diversity because it is our culture, and it is the right thing to do.”
These statements may seem innocuous — but our forthcoming research suggests that how an organization talks about diversity can have a major impact on its ability to actually achieve its diversity goals. Through a series of six studies, we explored both the prevalence of different types of diversity rhetoric in corporate communications, and how effective these narratives are when it comes to attracting underrepresented job candidates.
In our first study, we gathered publicly available text from all Fortune 500 companies’ websites, diversity reports, and blogs, and then used a machine learning algorithm to classify the data into one of two categories:
- The “business case” for diversity: a rhetoric that justifies diversity in the workplace on the grounds that it benefits companies’ bottom line
- The “fairness case” for diversity: a rhetoric that justifies diversity on moral grounds of fairness and equal opportunity
We found that the vast majority of organizations — approximately 80% — used the business case to justify the importance of diversity. In contrast, less than 5% used the fairness case. The remainder either did not list diversity as a value, or did so without providing any justification for why it mattered to the organization.
Given its popularity, one might hope that underrepresented candidates would find the business case compelling, and that reading this type of justification for diversity would increase their interest in working with a company. Unfortunately, our next five studies demonstrated the opposite. In these studies, we asked more than 2,500 individuals — including LGBTQ+ professionals, women in STEM fields, and Black American college students — to read messages from a prospective employer’s webpage which made either the business case, the fairness case, or offered no justification for valuing diversity. We then had them report how much they felt like they would belong at the organization, how concerned they were that they would be judged based on stereotypes, and how interested they would be in taking a job there.
So, what did we find? Translated into percentages, our statistically robust findings show that underrepresented participants who read a business case for diversity on average anticipated feeling 11% less sense of belonging to the company, were 16% more concerned that they would be stereotyped at the company, and were 10% more concerned that the company would view them as interchangeable with other members of their identity group, compared to those who read a fairness case. We further found that the detrimental effects of the business case were even starker relative to a neutral message: Compared to those who read neutral messaging, participants who read a business case reported being 27% more concerned about stereotyping and lack of belonging, and they were 21% more concerned they they would be seen as interchangeable. In addition, after seeing a company make a business case, our participants’ perceptions that its commitment to diversity was genuine fell by up to 6% — and all these factors, in turn, made the underrepresented participants less interested in working for the organization.
For completeness, we also looked at the impact of these different diversity cases on well-represented candidates, and found less consistent results. In one experiment, we found that men seeking jobs in STEM fields reported the same anticipated sense of belonging and interest in joining a firm regardless of which type of diversity rationale they read. But when we ran a similar experiment with white student job candidates, we found that as with underrepresented job candidates, those who read a business case also reported a greater fear of being stereotyped and lower anticipated sense of belonging to the firm than those who read a fairness or neutral case, which in turn led them to be less interested in joining it.
Clearly, despite ostensibly positive intentions, making the business case for diversity does not appear to be the best way to attract underrepresented job candidates — and it may even harm well-represented candidates’ perceptions of a prospective employer as well. Why might this be? To answer this question, it’s helpful to examine what the business case actually says.
The business case assumes that underrepresented candidates offer different skills, perspectives, experiences, working styles, etc., and that it is precisely these “unique contributions” that drive the success of diverse companies. This frames diversity not as a moral necessity, but as a business asset, useful only insofar as it bolsters a company’s bottom line. It also suggests that organizations may judge what candidates have to contribute on the basis of their race, gender, sexual orientation, or other identities, rather than based on their actual skills and experience — a stereotyping and depersonalizing approach that undermines candidates’ anticipated sense of belonging.
Ultimately, the business case for diversity backfires because it sends a subtle yet impactful signal that organizations view employees from underrepresented groups as a means to an end (an instrumental framing of diversity). This undermines organizations’ diversity efforts, before they’ve even had any direct interaction with these candidates.
So what should organizations do instead? Our research shows that the fairness case, which presents diversity as an end in itself (i.e., a non-instrumental framing of diversity), is a lot less harmful than the business case — in our studies, it halved the negative impact of the business case. But there’s another option that may be even better and simpler: Don’t justify your commitment to diversity at all. Across our studies, we found that people felt more positive about a prospective employer after reading a fairness case than after reading a business case — but they felt even better after reading a neutral case, in which diversity was simply stated as a value, without any explanation.
When we share this suggestion with executives, they sometimes worry about what to do if they’re asked “why” after they state a commitment to diversity with no justification. It’s an understandable question, especially in a world that has so normalized prioritizing the business case over all else — but it has a simple answer. If you don’t need an explanation for the presence of well-represented groups in the workplace beyond their expertise, then you don’t need a justification for the presence of underrepresented groups either.
It may seem counterintuitive, but making a case for diversity (even if it’s a case grounded in a moral argument) inherently implies that valuing diversity is up for discussion. You don’t have to explain why you value innovation, resilience, or integrity. So why treat diversity any differently?
Business Ideas
Business Ideas for The Post-Covid World
Published
10 months agoon
June 15, 2022By
Ivan Widjaya
Are you looking to get out of the daily 9-5 grind that you’re stuck in? Maybe you’re not but better ideas have crossed your mind? Or the idea of being your own boss is simply too tempting to pass up?
Luckily, in a world where tech is at the forefront of a lot of industries, it’s easier than ever to go your own way. You don’t need a premises to open a shop, just the products and a website. You don’t need an office space to be a secretary, just a reliable Wi-Fi connection. You don’t need to move to LA to make music friends, just your home set up.
As the saying goes, restrictions breed creativity, which was proven in the lockdowns. A lot of good ideas came about, and the best stuck. We’re running down a few ideas that could prompt you to get out there on your own and make something of yourself. Read on for all the details of the best industry ideas that came out of lockdown.
Influencer
Don’t scoff. Depending on how you do it, there is a lot of skill and a lot of money in influencing. It’s likely that you are only seeing one side of things, which is usually a well-lit photo of a coffee cup taken in the golden hour. But what if I told you that a lot of skills – creative and business – went into taking that shot. It might feature a product placement for a coffee company, it might be used as a networking opportunity to catch the eye of a brand or generate buzz. It might simply be used to market their own business.
And then there is the content itself, which encompasses everything from capture to edit. Filming, photography, editing, music, graphic design, and presentational skills are all part of making quality content. There are a lot of transferable skills in both.
You can use influencing to market your own business, or even start your own affiliate blog, which serves as a site where you can showcase your favourite items for commission. A couple of hours’ worth of work a week can gain you a full-time employment salary.
Either way, getting the basics of the role of an influencer down will ensure that you can market just about anything else on your agenda, such as…

Hospitality
The hospitality industry had to go through a lot of changes through lockdown. Closing entirely soon gave way to take-out services, which eventually gave way to social distanced dining, but in that time, a lot of new ideas hit the table on how the food service industry could shake things up.
The most common idea was food through a window. A collection/delivery service where restaurants and cafes couldn’t serve food inside their premises so instead handed them over through a window. When things opened up again, the idea stuck. The roads are full of delivery drivers and cyclists for everything from the mom-and-pop café to the nearest fast-food supplier. It means less of premises and therefore less rent, or you can even do it directly from your home kitchen, making the gap between beginner and business a lot closer.
And then there is the idea of food trucks. You’d be surprised how much a food truck is making during the lunch hour alone. There was a class bias there once, where a food truck meant low quality, “junk” food, but street food is on the rise. It’s usually very high quality, tastes like nothing you’ve tried before since they don’t have to convince investors the masses will eat it, and they go wherever is most popular in the moment. You’ll see food trucks at the park, at festivals, outside clubs, etc. It’s also appealing to the customer because it’s usually more affordable. If you’re worried about menu pricing, take a look at this guide.

Freelancer
When the doors to offices started opening up again, the response was a resounding, “Do we have to?” Middle managers were surprised to find that employees all around the world where in fact enjoying working from home. There was more freedom, whether to work around external obligations like childcare or an exercise regime, or to simply stop for five minutes for a breather without worrying that your boss thinks your slacking off. And we’d be remised to mention that workers were reporting getting more work done at their own pace, because we know managers love productivity.
So, it only makes sense that, while working from home, some employees started wondering why they needed the middleman at all, and suddenly freelance became a viable option again. You can work at your own pace, avoiding all the money spending and polluting that comes with commuting, and be your own boss on top of that.
And it’s easy to apply a freelancing role to almost any skillset. To start, take a look at the role you’re in at the moment. If you can do it from a computer, is there anything stopping you doing it for yourself rather than a company? Think about applying a freelance position to the role you have for an easy transition.
However, if you’re trying to get out of the job, you’re in, there are a lot of options there too. It’s all about matching your skillset to the right freelance job. If you have skills in numbers, you can look into accounting. If you’re handy, you can get a van and get into trades like plumbing, carpentry, DIY, etc. If you have organizational skills, you can look into being a personal assistant to various clients. If you have writing skills you can look into ghost writing, copywriting, journalism, etc.
Teacher
And there is another option if you have all these skills that you can use: teaching. Teaching comes in many capacities. The traditional means of teaching in a school takes a lot of education and internships before you are there in the room, but lockdown has unveiled a lot of ways it can be easier.
If that doesn’t appeal to you, you can use the best lesson of business life in lockdown: use video calls. Sure, traditional teachers and lecturers had to adapt to Zoom, and some didn’t do well there, but you’ve been using Zoom for at least a couple of years now, and you can use it to teach all around the world. Get hired as a personal tutor or put university study groups together to give more personal tutoring to those who are willing to pay for a helping hand.
And, going back to the influencer’s …influence, a lot of online courses are popping up on big social media accounts. You can record a curriculum of your chosen topic and sell access to it for anyone who is interested.
The best part about this is that you can sell courses on just about anything, be it fitness regimes, makeup tutorials, cooking, DIY, or university subjects like social sciences and literature analysis.
If you can market yourself as a reliable source in your field of study, you can record everything you know in some simple, easy to digest content, and put it behind a paywall like Patreon.

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