
Dmesh phtos how to#
Now, new hires meet together on Teams where they receive instructions on how to create a digital avatar and access One Accenture Park, a shared virtual space that enables immersive experiences during onboarding.
Dmesh phtos professional#
The onboarding process typically involves gathering new-hire cohorts and senior leadership in an office to go through a series of experiences that help people understand and personally connect with the Accenture culture, plant the seeds of professional relationships and set them up for success starting from their first projects. Accenture hires more than 100,000 people each year. Soon after the pandemic hit, the ultimate use case emerged: Onboarding new employees. Jazzed after each event, he’d have ideas for five more. His favorite feature, he added, is the ability to bump into colleagues from around the world and have deep and meaningful conversations. “We started to call it the Nth Floor, this magical, mythical campus that could only be found in virtual reality,” said Jason Warnke, senior managing director and global digital experiences lead for Accenture. Before the pandemic, for example, Accenture built a virtual campus where employees from anywhere could gather for coffees, presentations, parties and other events. Kipman and his team have spent several years building Mesh-enabled immersive spaces with global professional services company Accenture, which has more than 600,000 people serving clients all over the world.

Image courtesy of Microsoft On the Nth Floor It’s all coming together.” Mesh for Teams users can take their avatars into immersive spaces to experience those serendipitous encounters that spark innovation. “As a company whose focus is on productivity, on knowledge workers, it’s something that customers are really asking us for, and it’s coupled with the vision of mixed reality that we’ve been working on for 12 years. “Welcome to Mesh for Teams,” said Microsoft Technical Fellow Alex Kipman. Mesh for Teams users can take their avatars into these spaces to mix and mingle, collaborate on projects and experience those serendipitous encounters that spark innovation. Organizations can also build immersive spaces – metaverses – within Teams. The first step most users of Mesh for Teams will take is to join a standard Teams meeting as a customized avatar of themselves instead of as a static picture or on video. Think of the metaverse as a new version – or a new vision – of the internet, one where people gather to communicate, collaborate and share with personal virtual presence on any device. It’s also a gateway to the metaverse – a persistent digital world that is inhabited by digital twins of people, places and things. Mesh for Teams – which anyone will be able to access from standard smartphones and laptops to mixed-reality headsets – is designed to make online meetings more personal, engaging and fun.

“We’ve seen that those tools have accomplished both goals of helping a team be more effective and also helping individuals be more engaged.” These tools are all ways “to signal we’re in the same virtual space, we’re one team, we’re one group, and help take the formality down a peg and the engagement up a peg,” Teper said. Mesh builds on existing Teams features such as Together mode and Presenter mode that make remote and hybrid meetings more collaborative and immersive, according to Jeff Teper, a Microsoft corporate vice president whose responsibilities include the Microsoft 365 productivity tools Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive. The feature combines the mixed-reality capabilities of Microsoft Mesh, which allows people in different physical locations to join collaborative and shared holographic experiences, with the productivity tools of Microsoft Teams, where people can join virtual meetings, send chats, collaborate on shared documents and more. Microsoft today has unveiled a solution to this problem that begins rolling out in 2022: Mesh for Microsoft Teams. Too many people, too much of the time, are a static picture or bubble with initials.

But the video option can be awkward and binary – on or off. Ongoing studies in Microsoft’s research organization prove this out: people feel more present and engaged in meetings when everyone turns on their video cameras, for example. In other words, the ability to work from anywhere and connect with colleagues online is awesome, but remote meetings can feel impersonal and lack the small moments that build relationships and careers.

They miss the body language from across the conference room table that says things that can’t be said. They miss hallway moments, kitchen catch-ups and chance encounters. More than a year and a half into a global pandemic that forced workers around the world to abandon their offices and learn to collaborate online, Microsoft productivity experts have observed two trends: remote workers are far more efficient than most business leaders ever imagined, and they miss each other.
