Put on your VR headset and meet me on the Nth Floor

It feels like quite a while since I got in an elevator. Not only because it’s tough to socially distance in that small a space, but also because the idea of moving between office floors seems alien territory after 12 months working from home. And yet, thanks to Microsoft’s recent announcement of Microsoft Mesh, we could all be taking an elevator to the “Nth Floor” soon—meeting virtually and having the same experiences, wherever we are based.

Collaborating across disparate locations is not a new concept for Accenture. Despite running a global team of more than 500,000 people, we have never really had a single, physical headquarters location. Instead, we’ve always worked in a highly distributed way across the world. As a result, we’ve needed to nurture a culture of collaboration—and have naturally taken a progressive stance on using the latest, cutting-edge technologies to achieve it. 

A good example of this is how we scaled to become the largest enterprise user of Microsoft Teams. More than just a replacement to Skype for Business, Teams enables new ways of working. It brings us the benefits of real-time collaboration, seamless integration of meetings, video and voice calls, chats and file sharing, along with the integration of third-party apps and connectors—we like it so much we’re now doing nearly 90M minutes of video conferencing each month. 

In many ways our Teams journey is not just about getting all of our people onto the platform but leveraging Teams “as a Platform” so that we can deliver insights, applications and easy actions to our teams in the flow of work. We want to help our people to collaborate with their colleagues—many of whom they have never met in person and are located around the globe across different time zones—as well as our clients and partners in the most frictionless ways possible.

Human beings are naturally social animals who seek to establish connections. Technology helps us to deliver them. Add in the fact that Accenture people have always been hungry for the “what’s next?” in everything we do and you have a perfect storm of technology and human ingenuity around how we connect, create, ideate and learn.

I feel fortunate in my role as Digital Experiences Lead, along with my team to be in the privileged position of being able to imagine and deliver our next-generation digital experiences for our employees, clients, partners and acquisitions. 

We’ve all craved those serendipitous bump-ins with our colleagues in the last year. And it’s been a shame to miss the rite of passage of new joiners being shown around our offices, introducing them to a whole bunch of new names who could become the foundation for the rest of their career experiences.

As we embrace the new normal, I strongly believe that we need to create hybrid experiences, fast-tracking them from vision to a business-critical reality. And there’s no better time to do it. 

Today, we are excited to announce our plans to deliver some amazing hybrid scenarios using the new Microsoft Mesh enabled version of AltspaceVR, which has been reimagined for business, for our onboarding and learning experiences. We’ll be able to meet new people in our offices or have those water cooler moments again with our colleagues from all over the world on our very own “Nth Floor.”

Like any of our tech journeys, we’ll be finding our feet for a while. But it’s going to be an amazing, ambitious and unparalleled experience. So watch this space—and join me in the virtual elevator because I’m headed to the Nth Floor!