PLEASE VISIT OUR SPONSORS

Insight

Published April 2007

Meet & Greet in 3-D: Virtual Onboarding at IBM

 

  Daniel Margolis

In the range of options available to talent managers, one platform that's expanding rapidly is the virtual world. A growing number of companies now encourage their employees to onboard and network within online universes — essentially, they meet within a video game.

Computer users have been gathering in 3-D, virtual environments for years as part of game play. Companies have followed, seeing advertising potential in these environments. And now they are stepping into these universes themselves by having employees establish their own characters, called "avatars," in 3-D virtual worlds such as Second Life.

Second Life is a subscription-based program in which users can interact, create goods and services, and even buy and sell land.

IBM is now using it as a meeting place and orientation tool to easily merge and render accessible its workforce, effortlessly traversing vast geographical and cultural distances in the process. Chuck Hamilton, director of IBM's Center for Advanced Learning, is helping the company go virtual with thousands of employees.

TM: To what extent are your orientation and networking needs being moved over to Second Life?

CH: I don't think you're ever going to see all of anything go on in the space, but it is a way we can augment stuff we're already doing. We're initially applying it to a four pilot programs.

The first pilot program is the Fresh Blue program. The participants are interns in China. There are about 300 of them who are coming on this year who don't get an IBM ID, so they're not quite IBMers yet, but they're in the process of becoming IBMers. They need an external location where they can meet in the 2-D world, so in a sense, they need to be able to collaborate in the standard Web environment that we see, so we set up an environment for that.

At the same time, we were asked, "Could they physically meet, not physically in that they go to a building, but could they physically meet in a virtual world?" They could virtually meet in these worlds to do some other things — maybe get to know one another a little bit better, build some relationships with those people, practice doing things that they would need to do, so we don't have to bring these interns from all different parts of China to some physical place to have these ad hoc meetings and direct some of their learning. So, Second Life is playing a role in bridging both the cultural gap and the geography gap in that case.

The second pilot program is centered on a group in India, actual IBMers who are new to IBM, so they're part of the onboarding process that we have at IBM. The concern is that we want to get them into some kind of real live, simulated project action as quickly as possible. Even though they may not be on a specific project, they want to try out different scenarios.

With them, IBM was using another virtual world called Plane Shift, but we found we could do much more in a Second Life environment to do this kind of simulated work. They could work on teams and work on a project together and understand what it was like to have certain resources and so on. So, they moved a portion of their training over to Second Life, and again, they're still going to have some face-to-face meetings and regular training, but in addition, now they have an opportunity to meet in this way.