The (Virtual) Global Office

The (Virtual) Global Office
Moving beyond Second Life marketing, many companies are infiltrating virtual worlds for employee meetings, mixers, and recruiting

Using software from Activeworlds,
IBM builds virtual work spaces that let workers in far-flung regions
use avatars, or graphic representations of themselves, to handle such
tasks as rehearsing presentations or learning about employee benefits.
The experimentation puts IBM in the vanguard of companies that, having
tested the limits of marketing in such online environments as Second
Life, are now infiltrating virtual worlds to tackle a range of other
activities, from meetings to collaboration, from training to employee
recruiting.

First Came Virtual Marketing

At companies like Sun Microsystems (JAVA),
where upwards of 50% of employees may work outside traditional office
spaces on any given day, virtual worlds can help scattered colleagues
forge closer bonds. "It's difficult to maintain a global corporate
culture with people so spread around," says Nicole Yankelovich,
principal investigator at Sun Labs, who says the ethos can vary on Sun
campuses from Menlo Park, Calif., to Burlington, Mass. "Virtual world
technology is a way to bring the company together to build a global
corporate culture where people are on equal footing," she says.