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Businesses Digital IT

Miss Your Office? Some Companies Are Building Virtual Replicas (wsj.com) 48

Posted by BeauHD from the you-want-what-you-can't-have dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Stay-home orders and the shuttering of workplaces have given corporate employees some respite from getting dragged into time-wasting water-cooler conversations. But some companies and their employees don't want to leave everything about the office behind, it turns out, and are replicating their offices in "SimCity"-like simulations online. File-transfer service WeTransfer BV opened its virtual space on May 1, almost seven weeks after closing its physical offices in New York, Los Angeles and Amsterdam as part of the global effort to slow the spread of the new coronavirus.

Graphics reminiscent of early "Tomb Raider" videogames depict a version of the company's Dutch headquarters, adapted to include pool tables, techno music and in-jokes such as a "memorial" library named for the very- much-alive chief creative officer. Staff roam around in the form of avatars such as robots and panda bears. Gordon Willoughby, the chief executive of WeTransfer, said the platform helps provide the social experience of office life in the way that Zoom calls and Slack have replaced business meetings and desk-side chats. That is particularly valuable for recent hires, he said. [...] Although clients can use Breakroom to create their office utopia, the platform also enables real-world elements such additional privileges for senior staff. In Sine Wave's own virtual world, senior members can lock the boardroom, which is located on top of a hill overlooking the rest of the office.
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Miss Your Office? Some Companies Are Building Virtual Replicas More

Miss Your Office? Some Companies Are Building Virtual Replicas

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  • Brought to you by.... (Score:3)

    by cayenne8 ( 626475 ) on Friday May 29, 2020 @09:21AM (#60120252) Homepage Journal
    ....the you gotta be fucknig kidding me department.

    Even if you put aside the stupidity of a low res virtual office with panda bear avatars aside.....do people really miss the full "office experience"???

    Geez....enjoy the freedom while you have it, eh?

    • Re:Brought to you by.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by i_ate_god ( 899684 ) on Friday May 29, 2020 @09:40AM (#60120350)

      Yes and no.

      Pros:

      1. No commuting means more time to either work or live.
      2. Far easier to maintain the household. Code compiling? Great time to start a load of laundry or give your floors a quick vaccuum.
      3. Much easier to save lunch money. It was never easy for me to make prepared lunches so I kept spending between $15 to $20, a day, on lunches/breakfasts at local restaurants near by. I also don't need an $80 monthly bus pass in the winter months.
      4. Easier to work on my own schedule. If I decide to wrap up a task at 9pm instead of 3pm, I still finished my task that day.
      5. Easier to ignore random questions. I get a Teams notification, but I don't have to respond to it right then and there.

      Cons:

      1. Meetings are less productive. It's easier to be distracted / not pay attention / miss details. And perfect conference software doesn't seem to exist.
      2. Less human interaction over all. Not just between you and your coworkers, but between you and local business owners/staff of restaurants/stores you commonly go to.
      3. Happy hour. Yes, the pubs are all closed anyways, but when they reopen, working from home will probably continue. Having drinks with my coworkers is really great because it's hard to complain about your job to your friends if they don't do something similar. It's much much easier to blow off steam with coworkers.
      4. Climate control. I don't have central air, the office does. It is superior in every way. I miss it now that the temps are in the upper 30ies.
      5. Less exersice. Saving the commute time is great, but in the summer my commute was by bike. I could go on random bike rides, but it's harder for me to get motivated to do so when I don't have a destination for the bike ride.

      I'd argue that the pros outweigh the cons, but that's entirely subjective.

      • I find my meetings are SIGNIFICANTLY more productive using Zoom / Teams. People arrive on time, the agenda is published ahead of time. Yes, there are times I am distracted by an email, or something during the meeting. However, previously, I was sitting in 30 minutes of stuff that had no relation to my job. Now at least, I can do something during that time.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          My meetings are significantly more productive using text.

          "Do we need to have a call?"

          "No."

        • In my office, we've been holding most meetings online for years with Skype for Business and its predecessor Lync. Some folks have worked at home full time B.C.; some are in other cities and states. Some just don't like leaving their cubicle.

    • My coffee on my balcony by my river / park every morning says no.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AuMatar ( 183847 )

      I miss the office. I miss going into work every day. I miss seeing my coworkers and friends every day. I miss the casual conversations. I miss being able to contribute to other projects through them. I miss being kept up to date on what else is happening in my division. I miss the structure that commuting to work provides daily.

      Going remote has given me... nothing. Its taken away many things I enjoy, and left me in a place where its almost impossible to get work done. I'd be in the office tomorrow i

      • I miss the office. I miss going into work every day. I miss seeing my coworkers and friends every day. I miss the casual conversations.

        Well, I guess we differ a lot in this way and I'd not thought of it.

        I have pretty much always separated my co-workers from my "real" personal life.

        Co-workers are co-workers...they are not my friends or confidants. That can get really messy, especially these days if they are of the opposite sex.

        With former days of co-workers, I was always friendly, conversational on a li

  • And I am in the office typing this. Working from home = freedom

  • Miss your office? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by t4eXanadu ( 143668 ) on Friday May 29, 2020 @09:24AM (#60120286)

    Uh, maybe the upper level management misses it because they can't exert their power in person, from which they likely derive all meaning. The rest of us, though? I don't think so.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by iONiUM ( 530420 )

      I'm a regular developer and I miss the office. I liked having a clear division between home and work. I liked having a place where my kids aren't (I like my kids but they can be very disruptive, especially when everything outside of the home is closed). I liked physically seeing my co-workers and talking to them. And I also liked being able to go into a room together to whiteboard ideas -- I know we can do this virtually but it's really not the same.

      I even miss the 20 minute commute to work where I could so

      • I shudder at the thought of having to go buy and wear "work clothes" ever again.....

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by iONiUM ( 530420 )

          I wear the same clothes at home as I did at work.. Always very casual. Shorts and a t-shirt in the summer with running shoes.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        I even miss the 20 minute commute to work where I could sort of tune out and get into / out of the work mentality before / after work.

        This is actually not insignificant. For a lot of jobs, the commute serves as a decompression or switchover time. There are jobs that demand it - if you have to leave the problems of work at work in order to have a better home life, the commute helps accomplish it.

        Think first responders and such - they see all sorts of crap on their jobs, and honestly, you'll find many use the

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AuMatar ( 183847 )

      Every developer I know misses it. The only place I see people talking about how great it is is slashdot. I'm pretty sure its the same dozen or so uber introverts saying it over and over. I'm an introvert who rarely does anything on weekends and I miss the office.

  • "We can replicate any office (Score:3)

    by Dirk Becher ( 1061828 ) on Friday May 29, 2020 @09:29AM (#60120312)

    as long as its a cubicle."

  • One of the most overlooked portion from work from home, is the lack of "Water Cooler Conversation" In where people take a break from doing their work to just talking about it, or taking a break from it.
    Even in an office environment I need to distract Jr. Developers from their work, because I can see that they are stuck on a problem and are coding themselves in a circle. (I know they really hate it too) That distraction and conversation on a different topic, gets them out of that loop thinking, and when th

  • When my office reopens, I want a mannequin sitting at my desk while I work from home. My coworkers can rubber duck with it and talk about what shows they're watching. It will be listening and caring as much as I would be in person.

  • The 1990s are back? (Score:3)

    by thogard ( 43403 ) on Friday May 29, 2020 @09:40AM (#60120352) Homepage

    I built a model of my workplace using a outstanding modeling system known as Wolfenstein 3D. It didn't simulate the coworkers very well as a most of the simulated people seemed much ruder than the real people.

  • "Yes." - No one, ever

  • I know I'm old -- I'm 45 this month. And when I started work back in the Stone Age (late 90s) offices outside of the SF/SV startup bubble were boring gray places that people didn't really long to be in. I've continued to work for companies that don't subscribe to the "fun" office space idea.

    What I don't get though is WHY people don't see that all the preschool office layouts, free food and forced camaraderie with The Team is designed to extract maximum work from them. It's like Stockholm Syndrome -- the wor

    • People like being away from their family. They like having bathrooms that someone else has to clean. They like free coffee and snacks. There are a ton of advantages to working at the office.

    • People can be cheap and easily convinced that they are pulling one over on their bosses. I remember hearing about NYC lawyers cleverly staying until 9:01 every night to "take advantage" of their their firm's "you worked late (after 9pm) so you get a free limo home." They thought they were abusing a perk that was supposed to exist if you worked until midnight. The law firms were getting 4 more hours of professional billable hours for the price of a limo ride. And of course, setting the expectation that p

    • Most workers can't create a pleasant home work environment without spending a ton of money no one has right now.

      Exactly.

      I work remotely, but I don't work from home. I rent an office. The office is about a 10 minute drive from home. It's just me in there. There's a community refrigerator, copy-machine, and coffee, if I want to partake of them. And that's about it.

      Personal opinion, I think this might be an interesting WeWork-y type of thing. Get some space and subdivide it into offices--forget the whole hot desk/open floorpan/collaborative environment BS. Set them up close to suburban housing areas. I think you

      • The rental/subscription workspaces in my area all have optional fully enclosed dedicated offices or few-person shared offices in addition to the typical shared open plans.

  • ... the obligatory break room refrigerator from which lunches mysteriously disappear?

  • ... kinda like that movie with Michael Douglas (Disclosure?) Where the guy's avatar actually walks up to a virtual file cabinet to steal information?

  • They are all the same. Bland, anticreative to the point of being fake-creative (e.g. "fun" and "casual" design etc), soul-crushing human resource squeezing and draining boiler room cogworks.

    This is a great time, because many Americans get (the time to) to freely think for the first timein their lives. And maybe to improve a few things.

  • It's been a while old friend.

  • I'm not.

    Stop wasting money on that bullshit and pay that dough to me instead.

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