Enterprise metaverse: Employees are ready, can organisations deliver?

Just as businesses are starting to find their groove with hybrid working, the workplace has begun to evolve again with the emergence of the metaverse.

New research from Lenovo reveals that close to half of employees (44 percent) are willing to work in the metaverse and believe that it can deliver benefits like productivity to the workplace.

The metaverse is primarily defined as a shared digital space with digital representations of people, places, and objects.

In the future, the metaverse can be a highly immersive extension of the physical world, with its rich user interface. At the enterprise level, this opens up possibilities for businesses to create a more viable, interactive workplace.

However, there is skepticism on whether companies have the capabilities to pull it off. Two in five (43 percent) respondents believe their employers do not, or probably do not have the knowledge or expertise to enable them to work in the metaverse of the future.

Ken Wong, president, Lenovo Solutions and Services Group, says: “The pandemic challenged us all to adapt to new ways of work – forcing organisations of all sizes to evolve at an exponential pace.

“The metaverse presents businesses with new opportunities but also more complex technological challenges, such as the need for more computing power, better integrated hardware, and simpler and more flexible IT solutions.”

Key findings from the survey include:

• While half of employees (44 percent) are willing to work in the metaverse, 20 percent are unwilling, with 21 percent say they are neutral and another 15 percent say they are not sure.
• Half of working adults (51 percent) agree that an employer’s speed of adoption of new technology is an indicator of readiness for new technological realities, such as the virtually enhanced physical reality of the metaverse.
• Working adults in Brazil (53 percent), Singapore (51 percent) and China (54 percent) are split evenly, with around half confident that their employers have the expertise to enable a metaverse workplace, and the other half less confident.
• Conversely, working adults in the United Kingdom (30 percent) and Japan (18 percent) are less optimistic.
• While 44 percent think the metaverse will improve their work productivity, three in five (59 percent) do not think or are not sure that their employers are currently investing enough in IT to help them maximise their productivity.

Wong says: “Though the metaverse has yet to be ubiquitous, organizations can get a head start with improving productivity at work. They do not have to invest significantly more capital to achieve that.

“Everything-as-a-service or pay-as-you-go models offer the flexibility, cost efficiency, and scalability to adapt to each company’s unique circumstance.”

To manage an increasingly complex technology, businesses need simple and flexible IT solutions. Lenovo’s solutions include ThinkReality platform, which is powering the enterprise metaverse with a portfolio of award-winning hardware, software, and services.

As-a-Service solution provides mission-critical support and services, enabling businesses to use technology to scale quickly, lower costs, and reap greater efficiencies.

With its flexible and transparent offerings, Lenovo has helped organisations from the education to aerospace sectors optimize the right technology with the potential to transform and future-proof their operations.

Wong adds: “We are just scratching the surface of the metaverse, not to mention the new economics of Web 3.0. For now, the metaverse opens up a world of possibilities for businesses, which according to our research, almost half of employees are willing to participate in.

“To grasp it, companies need to identify new ways to make the most of their technologies. And Lenovo’s everything-as-a-service offerings can help organisations unleash their full potential.”

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