NAB
Office workers are
now so accustomed to Zoom calls that a greater leap into the virtualization of
the workspace may not phase them. That’s just as well, because corporations are
planning to onboard more of us into the metaverse just as company structures themselves
morph into new operating models built on the decentralized web, or Web3.
article here
“The combination of
the metaverse and a decentralized Web3 has the potential to radically transform
operating models and the labor market,” explains an article written for the World
Economic Forum by Ravin Jesuthasan, senior partner and global leader for
transformation services at Mercer, and George Zarkadakis, senior fellow at the
GeoTech Centre of the Atlantic Council.
The main technology
here is the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), which run on public
blockchains and according to the authors are already reimagining how human
communities, businesses, and labor get organized.
“In such
decentralized organizations, leadership will rely on soft power and empathy,
using culture and shared values to align the interests of disparate
stakeholders to a common mission and purpose.”
DAOs exploit smart
contract architectures and digital tokens verified on public blockchains, such
as Ethereum, in order to give members of a DAO the possibility to directly
participate in its governance. Decision making thus becomes collective. As DAOs
are adopted more widely, “new types of businesses will emerge that would look
more like cooperatives and less than corporations, significantly reducing
agency costs.”
One of the most
significant implications of metaverse for the future of work relates to how
work will be organized and how talent connects to work.
As reported by WEF,
talent is connected to work either fixed (permanent employee) or flex
(freelance) but it spies another option with much greater agility, one where
work flows to talent.
The Forum also
thinks DAOs will shake up conventional corporate hierarchy into a flatter
construct. This would have a core group of individuals responsible for
coordination of work and delivering on the value proposition of the DAO.
A broader
“contributor group” would provides specific services to execute the mission of
the DAO. This includes other DAOs that provide services like HR, finance,
customer service and individual contributors (gig workers or contractors) that
take on projects as needed.
An even broader
group of “members” will promote brands, support crowdsourcing of ongoing
product innovation or otherwise contribute to the advancement of the DAO’s
mission.
Each of these
groups will be compensated quite differently, Jesuthasan and Zarkadakis
predict. The core group will share in the total value created by the DAO less
payments to the other two groups. The payments to the contributor group will
vary between fixed payments for ongoing services in the case of a DAO providing
HR services and more episodic payments to individual contributors as they take
on and execute specific projects. Members will be rewarded as they make various
contributions to the DAO with the potential for payment in NFTs with
virtual-to-physical redemptions.
If companies aren’t
already thinking along these lines then the message here is — get to grips with
the DAO.
“In most places
around the world DAOs do not currently have a legal status, which poses serious
issues, especially when a decentralized autonomous organization extends its
activities beyond the digital space. Regulators are still struggling to keep up
with the high rate of innovation that comes from Web3 pioneers. Nevertheless, there
are already clear opportunities for businesses to start thinking and piloting
use cases for a decentralized metaverse future.”
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