Avatars in the Working Environment

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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