With the impact of COVID-19, all industries are facing significant disruption to their day-to-day business and decision-making. They are undergoing monumental change while trying to maintain performance. This external shock has further highlighted the need for companies to evolve from their old structures and become agile.
In the agile way of working, the organization empowers its people to work with maximum flexibility and minimum constraint to optimize their performance and bring out their best selves. Agile working is a mix of actions and mindset. Often, leaders restructure their organization around agile principles but fail to fully integrate the agile mindset into the company's day-to-day operations. Combining the two components is vital for an organization to successfully create and respond to change in an uncertain and turbulent environment.
In the remote work world, video conferencing might seem like a suitable solution. However, people have increasingly reported exhaustion due to zoom fatigue. Research has shown that nearly half of the surveyed professional workers report a high degree of exhaustion due to the perpetual use of video conferencing.
Harvard Business Review, in its research, discovered that an engaged employee is 55% more productive than one who is not. Virtual reality now makes it possible to have a VR office with various productivity tools. A VR office is proving to be an advanced solution for remote, engaging, and creative, agile sessions. Conducting the Agile meeting in Virtual Reality increases not only the scope beyond the in-person availability constraints but also promotes the overarching idea of agility which is adapting to the changing times. Moreover, a virtual office generates a feeling of being in the same room for distributed participants, creates complete focus without distractions, and provides endless customizable space to collaborate and share ideas. Adding the VR element to the originally in-person scrum meetings enables companies to become more flexible and adapt to the latest employee needs around workplace flexibility. Below are some of the advantages of conducting agile meetings in virtual spaces:
Productivity tool kit
Virtual environments seamlessly transform into your agile office through productivity tools like pinboards, sticky notes, and whiteboards. Via the personal browser or screen-sharing feature, teams can collaborate using digital tools such as Jira and Miro to visualize their sprint progress in their VR room. Teams can also use the virtual watch to time-box their tasks.
Breakout rooms
Audio zones can function as breakout rooms to divide a bigger group into smaller ones for focused discussions. The “no-distraction” setup where each smaller group has its own private space allows them to privately discuss specific problems and collaborate on a solution without disturbing the other groups.
Persistent Rooms
One of the most significant advantages of conducting meetings in VR is that the content in a VR room is persistent. Unlike physical spaces, you don't need to rub off the whiteboards in the board room. All your pinboards and whiteboards will remain as it is until you enter the space again. The continued presence allows any participant to access the material from anywhere at any point in time.
Full Focus Mode
Unlike on 2D collaboration platforms, VR allows the participant to focus on the context entirely. A study by PwC highlighted that VR users are 3.75 times more likely to connect with the content than in a physical classroom setting. Once you wear the VR headset, you enter a no-distraction environment where you won't be able to see any notifications and hence would be wholly immersed in solving the problem. Estimates have shown that it takes 23 minutes, on average, to regain deep focus after an interruption. Thus by distancing you from such distractions, VR enables you to achieve deep focus.
At Arthur, we help organizations implement Virtual Reality as a collaboration platform to conduct meetings for geographically distributed or hybrid teams. To read more about the use of virtual reality in the workplace, please check out our other blogs.
