Remio provides an all-in-one solution for VR team-building exercises and immersive collaboration in the metaverse. The platform enables employees to onboard into VR in a fun, safe space where they can create their avatar, play, socialize and gain confidence engaging with their peers in a VR environment before expanding into professional environments for meetings, brainstorms and other strategic conversations. Better Than Unicorns makes metaverse adoption easy for companies through its Initiate, Collaborate, Integrate products.

It all started with a snowball fight. In early 2022, Better Than Unicorns and Remio partnered with Goodway Group to create a company-wide snowball fight among 200 of its employees attending the company’s bi-annual summit virtually, which enabled everyone to virtually connect during the company's bi-annual summit. Over the course of three days during the summit, employees attended meetings and split their time in fun VR experiences including snowball battles, paintball games and other team building experiences. Kandi Gongora, Chief People Officer at Goodway Group, said: “Remio provides an easy access point for our employees to connect through interactive games, with unique development opportunities and new methods of making meetings matter. In a custom-built environment like Remio, we can curate our team’s experience without losing organic water cooler conversations that can be challenging to create in a remote environment."   

After Goodway Group held their second summit of the year in-person and in VR the following summer, they developed a cohort of 17 Champions to work closely with Better Than Unicorns and leverage the Remio platform to evolve their VR experience into something bigger and more impactful. “Through VR Champions, team leaders from all across the company meet with us for 45-minute sessions each week in their custom Remio environment to go deeper into VR. To help build confidence with VR tools, the Champions help to lead 90-minute monthly orientations to VR with new employees to build adoption, comfort, excitement, and engagement,” said Diana McCall, Lead Facilitator and Co-Founder of Better Than Unicorns. This is a cross-functional team that includes and represents a wide variety of roles in the organization. VR Champions have the first touch with other employees, coordinating meetings in VR boardrooms that are used for strategy sessions and conversations. Champions report that the VR meetings consistently have greater focus and that teammates are more present and more creative. VR meetings also have a “sticky” residual effect, in that people feel more relaxed and relieved by taking a break from the multiple screens, email notifications, Teams/Slack alerts and more that can distract in typical meetings, where in VR they can fully immerse themselves and just focus. Jason Lett, VR Champion at Goodway Group, said: “Sprinkling in a VR meeting in place of some regular meetings gets you continually thinking about the effectiveness of those meetings and gives you practice of utilizing VR so that we can be really on-point professionally when we do run into an opportunity to meet with a client virtually.”

McCall emphasizes that Goodway Group started its VR journey with team-building and has been truly intentional about how they’ve invested in employees to expand and leverage VR as a tool for the workplace: “In VR, we’re using our brains in a whole new way, such as drawing in 3D and using your right and left brain such that you can access all different styles of thinking and expression.” Better Than Unicorns integrates the research they’ve uncovered on the activities and exercises we do in the real world to drive team collaboration, and has translated them into activities in VR to help companies be successful. "We're focused on team development in VR and the essential skills that a team needs. Leadership development is really about developing a team of leaders who know how to follow as well,” said Brett McCall, CEO and founder of Better Than Unicorns. Brett says that essential skills training in communication, collaboration, and confidence that you can develop in VR are typically viewed as soft or non-technical skills, and thus undervalued. With many teams working fully remote or hybrid, these skills as well as skills such as empathy are critically important today for companies. According to influential psychologist Daniel Goleman, empathy is one of the five key components of emotional intelligence – a vital leadership skill. It develops through three stages: cognitive empathy, emotional empathy and compassionate empathy. For example, VR is a powerful medium for building empathy in the workplace through programs in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). Ultimately, VR has the potential to benefit workplace culture like no other tool available in the remote workplace.

Goodway Group is continuing to experiment with how their employees engage in VR with the goal to be ahead of the curve and be comfortable in VR. Adoption of Web3 tools will be paramount for most marketing professionals. While the immersion into VR is still relatively new, the company is already looking forward to how its VR instance can further drive employee bonding and culture and drive innovation for the company in areas like advertising and collaboration with their own clients. As pioneers in the digital marketing industry, it’s no surprise that Goodway Group will continue championing for VR innovation at work.