An old professional adage goes: "Most meetings could be phone calls, most phone calls could be emails."
If only most managers realized that!
Alas, within a few years, apparently, most meetings will be meta:
In a year-end post on Gates' personal blog, the Microsoft co-founder included a prediction about the future of work, and how it could be changed by the rise of the metaverse, the virtual worlds being built by tech companies like Meta (formerly Facebook) and Microsoft, where users will be able to work, play and socialize.
Gates notes that the Covid-19 pandemic has already "revolutionized" the workplace, with more companies than ever offering flexibility for employees who want to work remotely. "Those changes will only intensify in the years to come," Gates writes, and he says remote working will only pull more people into the metaverse.
"Within the next two or three years, I predict most virtual meetings will move from 2D camera image grids...to the metaverse, a 3D space with digital avatars," Gates writes in his blog post.
Allow me to interject with some mild professional criticism here:
I suppose we were naive enough to think that the pandemic may have changed office culture and led managers to realize that three meetings a day just aren't necessary.
We were wrong!
