Avatars in the Working Environment

1. Avatars in the Working Environment

2. Avatar - Definition • There are many definitions of the word avatar: • An Avatar is Divinity taking a human form. • Avatar is a character that you can personalize and use when interacting with friends online, creating your own unique persona.

3. Important • Thousands of real-world employees are beginning to use avatars as part of their regular jobs. • There are many companies that have been using Avatars to deal with customers and internal matters: • IBM, Accenture, Cisco, State Farm, Intel, BP and Wells Fargo.

4. Avatar – Main Activities • Employees are logging into virtual worlds and use avatars to: • Brainstorm with colleagues, • Recruit employees, • Sell to customers, • Attend leadership training, • Manage programs, direct operation centers, • And collaborate with company groups around the world.

5. Avatar - 2011 • The Gartner Group predicts that 80% of us will use an avatar at work by the end of 2011.

6. Avatar – Benefits • They're practical: • It's easier, cheaper, greener, and healthier to meet people in a virtual world than it is to fly, drive and host a live meeting where people meet face to face. • Document sharing and all forms of AV as well as tracking methods, create a richer, more interesting environment with contextual clues about who's interested and who's paying attention.

7. Avatar – Benefits • You can do things with avatars that you can't do in the real world: • You can customize your avatar by picking your appearance, role, personality, size, gender and race; you can have total control over its movements. • Puppeteering an avatar is a whole lot of fun.

8. Avatar – Benefits • People become more interested: • As a result of this intensity, avatars create the emotional and social connections necessary for the most valuable business conversations.

9. Avatar – Problems • Using Avatars can offer some problems since it creates an imaginary world with characters that don't exist. • It can develop an Internet Addiction Disorder with a major impact on our mental health (obsession).

10. Avatar – Problems • It can interfere in our everyday life and decision-making when facing the real world. • It can give up or reduce important family, social, occupational, or recreational activities in duration because the user can get out of his imaginary and fun world. • Feeling of incapacity to deal with real life problems.

11. Avatar – Conclusion • The sense of engagement that avatars can create will be valuable as companies seek new ways to design work that is compelling and purposeful. • Avatars generate a kind of fun that isn't the opposite of work — it's a reason that people will engage their work.

12. Avatar – Conclusion • But we need to be always aware of the many differences between Neverland and our Real World.