Why the Metaverse Will Change the Way You Work

In his job as a music-mastering engineer, Chris Longwood spends hours making Zoom calls and exchanging emails with artists around the globe to get a new album ready for release. He looks forward to the day he can meet with them in a virtual sound studio, editing tracks in real time.

“I see a future where my clients can put on a headset or glasses and be able to feel like they are in the studio with me,” said Mr. Longwood, a 35-year-old who lives in Houston. “We could have real back-and-forth conversations and not have to take turns talking, like on Zoom.”

Soon it won’t be science fiction. Tech visionaries expect scenarios much like this in the developing world they call the metaverse. When we need to get together with colleagues or customers to do more than chat, we’ll log into virtual spaces so realistic it will seem as if we’re physically in the same room. We’ll see each other in the form of avatars that, if we choose, look nearly identical to our real selves. And with specialized gloves on our real hands, we’ll be able to touch and manipulate virtual versions of goods like machinery or fabrics.

Many companies that embrace remote work will still turn to in-person meetings from time to time. But some workplace experts expect the new virtual realm to fundamentally change the way many people do their jobs—and also to create new jobs, some unknown today. Though the metaverse is still in early stages, and hardware can be expensive and clunky, these experts see strong potential benefits spurring companies to invest in coming years.

The metaverse is also expected to bring challenges, such as greater competition for jobs and increased turnover as employees’ locations become less important. Employers could more closely monitor workers’ behavior, raising privacy issues. And virtual offices will grapple with the need for new rules—for instance, avatar dress codes.

People aren’t expected to spend entire workdays wearing clunky headsets for virtual meetings. Instead, forecasters see the interactions with the virtual world happening when it’s most useful—either partially or as a full immersion. The hardware will become lighter, cheaper and more advanced.

“The metaverse will be evolutionary, not revolutionary,” says John Egan, chief executive of Paris-based forecasting firm L’Atelier BNP Paribas. “Our productive capacity is going to be significantly enlarged in the same way that computers and mobile phones enabled greater levels of productivity and complexity.”

Here are some of the ways the metaverse is expected to change the workplace.

Meet Me at the Virtual Whiteboard

Get ready to meet with colleagues and others from any location in an instant—no need for travel or even walking across a corporate campus.

“By virtue of teleportation, you can find people much faster,” says Florent Crivello, founder and CEO of Teamflow, a venture-backed startup that creates virtual office spaces.

Such meetings will go far beyond Zoom sessions, for instance enabling workers to collaborate on designing toys, furniture or buildings using 3D tools. During downtime, they could go bowling at a virtual alley to socialize. While an old-school call might do, gathering around a virtual watercooler could make for a more engaging experience, metaverse proponents say.

Working in virtual settings could help streamline what today are lengthy, complex processes. Tolga Kurtoglu, chief technology officer of HP Inc., envisions testing how new vehicles handle crashes before they’re manufactured. Virtual cars would replace real vehicles and dummies, and show how a vehicle performs under any number of weather or traffic conditions.

“The more you bring in next-generation collaboration tools, you will significantly accelerate product-development cycles,” Dr. Kurtoglu says.

A virtual setting could give people whose jobs require handling dangerous or expensive equipment a way to safely practice or experiment with new methods, says Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab.

That type of application will be what brings people to the metaverse, he says. “A lot of us think we’re going to put on goggles to come to offices,” he says, but “there’s got to be a reason to go into VR.”

A Job You Haven’t Heard of

When the Web emerged, businesses across sectors created online presences. A similar development will happen in the metaverse, bringing new jobs, forecasters say. New virtual shops, entertainment venues, classrooms and other spaces will need live support—as well as people to build them in the first place.

Some jobs that emerge may not exist today. Before the internet, “would you have ever guessed there would be people called social-media influencers making a living?” Dr. Kurtoglu says. With the metaverse, “It’s likely that new job categories will be created that we don’t have visibility into just yet.”

Other jobs will change. For example, real-estate agents will show customers virtual replicas of properties for sale and tour guides will give virtual previews of real-world vacations, L’Atelier’s Mr. Egan predicts. Eventually, purely virtual homes and vacation destinations could become part of the offerings.

Mr. Egan also foresees jobs that evolve around AI-powered bots designed to imitate the look and behaviors of real people, living or dead. “Someone has to build these experiences,” he says, and others will then come up with ways to earn a living from them. “Imagine,” he says, “your job is to use archive footage to design a lecture by Albert Einstein, a concert by Elvis or a poetry reading by Maya Angelou.”

Hiring and Training Morph

The metaverse could further the trend of workers living far from their employers, giving job seekers and companies more options. “Talent won’t be acquired depending on location,” says Richard Kerris, an executive at Nvidia Corp. who is co-leading a metaverse-infrastructure project called Omniverse.

At least part of the job-interview process will take place in the metaverse. That means, among other things, candidates will need to acquire appropriate avatar attire, says Jared Spataro, corporate vice president of modern work at Microsoft Corp. “How you represent yourself in the virtual world will be just as important as how you represent yourself in the real world,” he says.

Training for new hires will evolve. Virtual-reality and augmented-reality technology—already used for military, law-enforcement and healthcare job training—will become more sophisticated, tech visionaries say. New hires at manufacturing plants will learn how to operate complex machinery; at warehouses they’ll get trained on how to pack boxes; and at retail stores they’ll get to know every product and where each belongs–all in virtual replicas of those places.

“The biggest difference when it comes to training is that the feedback loops will be 10 times shorter,” says Teamflow’s Mr. Crivello.

Accenture PLC created its own virtual-reality environments for training courses. Eventually workers will be able to enter VR to practice giving managerial feedback to an AI bot or visit an oil rig for simulated training.

“It’s scratching the surface with respect to what we think immersive learning unlocks for us—you can just keep doing it until you get better at it,” said Jason Warnke, who leads Global Digital Experience at Accenture PLC.

New Privacy Questions

Along with advances in work and training, the metaverse could provide organizations with an exponentially more powerful tool for oversight and surveillance. Your boss might miss seeing you roll your eyes at an in-person or video meeting—in the metaverse, if eye-tracking is enabled on your headset, that expression can be recorded and logged. If coupled with data about body temperature or heart rate from a smart watch, the information could be used to try to infer a worker’s emotional state, says Kurt Opsahl, general counsel of privacy-watchdog group Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The nudges that people have become accustomed to as online consumers—like product suggestions or refill reminders—could become part of their metaverse work lives, says Brian Kropp, chief of human-resources research at research firm Gartner. You could get a notification that someone in another meeting mentioned something relevant to your own projects, or a mid-meeting prompt that a participant is drifting off.

“As the manager [you would] have a real-time dashboard of who’s paying attention, who’s not paying attention,” says Mr. Kropp. “You’ll get a nudge as a manager saying, ‘I noticed Bob seems to have a confused look on his face, now might be a good time to ask what he’s thinking,’ or ‘Jill hasn’t talked in the last 30 minutes, you should invite her to get involved.’”

A savvy manager might make these observations in a video meeting now, but in the metaverse the technology would do the observing and inform the boss, he says.

While that could be useful in finding ways to motivate workers, such technology could also be used to predict who might be a troublemaker and sideline them, Mr. Opsahl says. Or someone could be misread. “This is a concerning thing, whether it’s right or wrong,” he says. “If it’s able to understand and react to your emotional state, there’s the potential for manipulation or invasive misuse of that data.”

As a competitive rower in my long-ago prime I sometimes used a racing strategy called fly and die. Sprinting to an early lead often yielded a fast overall time, even if I couldn’t hold my torrid pace through the finish line.

Some professionals take a similar approach to their desk jobs, starting their workdays with a 5 a.m. to 9 a.m. shift. They are up before the sun—and, more important, before their co-workers—to get a jump on the workday and impress the boss.

Nothing screams go-getter like a predawn email! Getting stuff done early allows them to clock out midafternoon and still look like stars, even if their routines require Ben Franklin-esque sleep schedules and vats of caffeine.

Melissa O’Blenis rises by 4:30 a.m. for prayer and Peloton time before starting her job at the digital consulting firm Argano.

“I just love checking things off my list,” she says. “I need that focus time away from Teams messages, email notifications and text alerts.”

A mother with two sets of twins, O’Blenis, 48, often breaks for her kids’ afternoon sports without feeling guilty or judged. Colleagues jokingly call her Granny because her 9 p.m. bedtime makes the early starts possible. But Granny got the last laugh when she was promoted to a director-level role in March.

More than 90% of knowledge workers want to flex their hours, according to surveys by Slack’s Future Forum . In the pandemic many of us got in the habit of handling personal commitments during standard business hours, then catching up on work tasks later .

Now that the office battle is largely over, fighting a return to rigid, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. schedules might be workers’ last stand. But managers complain about afternoon dead zones when employees are out of pocket.

The solution for more workers is starting sooner instead of finishing later. Workflow software maker Asana reports that 21.4% of users are logging on between 5 a.m. and 9 a.m. this year, up from 19.8% in 2021. About 12% of work tasks are completed before 9 a.m., the company says, compared with 10% before the pandemic.

Early-bird bosses

Gibran Washington and his basketball teammates at Hofstra University used to run at 6 a.m. He maintained his early wakeups while climbing the ranks in food-and-beverage management.

By 9 a.m. meetings, he had already exercised, meditated and put in a couple of hours of work.

“I always found myself more prepared than my colleagues who hadn’t had their first cup of coffee yet,” says Washington, 40, who doesn’t drink coffee. Now he is chief executive of Ethos Cannabis, a chain of 12 dispensaries in three states, and rises as early as ever.

Waking and working ahead of the pack is a common CEO habit, from Apple ’s Tim Cook to General Motors ’ Mary Barra . Even if your ambitions are less grand than the corner office, starting early could help you stand out for one simple reason: The boss is probably up, too, and taking notice.

Matt Kiger says being the first one into the office helped him catch his manager’s eye and advance after changing careers from education to media sales. He would set his alarm for 5 a.m., hop a train from Connecticut to New York and be at his workstation before 7.

“I thought, ‘What is it going to take to break through?’” he recalls. “‘It’s going to take being there when my boss comes in, already at my desk making phone calls.’”

Now a senior vice president for digital sales at Townsquare Media , Kiger, 47, says much of the daily communication among company leaders happens by text and phone from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. It’s possible to succeed as a night owl, he says, but people who sleep in risk missing a window when many executives are awake and accessible. While some working parents can’t swing early-morning meetings, others like Kiger say they are the key to being present at kids’ after-school activities.

Getting the worm

Matt Sunshine—whose surname surely predestined him to be a morning person—wakes at 5:30 a.m. to read the news. Then he cycles or takes a Pilates class and is on his computer by 7.

Sunshine is CEO of the Center for Sales Strategy in Tampa, Fla., which helps healthcare, media and professional-services companies generate leads. He doesn’t expect his 55 employees to follow his schedule but says it becomes progressively harder to get his attention as the day goes on and his calendar fills up with meetings. He also tries to log off by 5:30 p.m. for family time, so working after hours won’t necessarily make an impression.

“If you want to get my attention, a good time to get me is first thing in the morning,” Sunshine, 55, says. “Because people know I’m an early riser, I think that does influence other people to do the same.”

Elvi Caperonis’s morning routine is next-level organised. Her alarm rings at 6 a.m. She goes for a run at 6:30. At 7 she showers and eats breakfast. At 7:30 she opens her laptop and sets a timer for 25 minutes. That’s her first block to focus on the most important task of the day before a five-minute break. She repeats the on-off work pattern throughout the day.

Caperonis, a technical program manager at Amazon , makes a daily to-do list with nine items. She rates one critical, three medium-level and five lower-priority. This helps her work efficiently and in the right order.

The 41-year-old works from home in Florida and often picks her daughter up from school at 2:30 p.m., freedoms she has preserved partly by being highly productive early in the day, she says. Much of her job involves identifying potential risks to a project’s success, and when she sends an early-morning alert it arrives really early for company leaders in the Pacific time zone.

“They appreciate having that information first thing when they open their email,” she says. “In my experience, leaders are also early birds.”