It's interesting being a pioneer looking to embrace new technology before the masses. Obviously there is a lot of talk about what a virtual office might look like however we believe we have a pretty good handle on the concept of the virtual office.
Remember the movie disclosure with Michael Douglas and Demi Moore? Remember the virtual environment that the company they worked for was developing... Well that technology now exists today and more importantly we are using it...
What you may ask am I talking about. I'm talking about virtual persistent 3D virtual offices where we can interact in a shared environment which closely approximates that of bricks and mortar... We have been using this "Second Life" type environment now for almost 2 months and I'll be honest the results are nothing short of extraordinary. Our productivity has went through the roof and meetings which would have been almost impossible to have IRL without significant expense and travel are now done inside of a virtual environment.
So I have digressed and now to the meat of the Post:
A typical day at the Virtual Office.
I'll usually roll out of bed around 6:15 - 6:30 in the morning... Grab a bite to eat of breakfast and then get in front of my machine, put my headset on and launch eXp Virtual (our virtual office platform).
I'll normally stop by the eXp Operations room to meet with our Outsource team. These are members of our team who work outside of the borders of the United States and do development work, manage our Newsletters, do some of web and collateral material development work. We'll review what they had worked on during their day (our night) to see what progress they had made on the different projects they are working on. That meeting will usually last from 7:00am - 8:00am. Keep in mind we are all in Avatars, all with headsets on and we are sharing screens working on documents and demonstrating task level work which has been done or trying to determine what the next steps.
8:00 - 9:00am I just into our leadership team meeting inside of the eXp Boardroom. Currently we are working on getting Arizona opened up so typically I'll meet with our broker for AZ, our President (also in Arizona) as well as our onshore IT/Development and Administrative Team. All of us are logging in from their homes but we all work together. Normally this group will range from 8 - 11 people depending on what is going on.
On Monday at 9:00am - 11:00am is our eXp Barcamp. This is a relatively unstructured collaborative meeting where everyone is encouraged to bring something they are passionate about and run a meeting of their own for 30 minutes. We'll start by all getting together initially in one common space and breaking out into smaller groups to discuss the topics which we have brainstormed to be facilitated.
On Tuesdays is our Washington State and Arizona State Company meetings. Similar to the office meetings in a Physical Office we meet online in our Virtual Theatre and go over all the materials which we need everyone to stay current on. We might display a video, Powerpoint, Wiki, Website or other materials during the meeting and everyone can ask questions and/or participate directly (via their headset) or via the ongoing Text Chat.
At 11:00am - noon I typically meet again with our developers to see any demonstrations that they might be needing to discuss directly. We'll review where the current state of the Application is and if necessary run some test data through it before moving it into our production application. All the testing will take place online.
Noon: Well a guy has to eat, so I'll typically break and go to lunch with someone IRL. Somewhere around 2:00 - 2:30 I'll get back online with either individual agents to do presentations for them or collaborate on a project or open up a round table to talk about a subject to get us further down the road of having a totally defensible business model.
3:00 - 4:30 I'll start to wrap up the day with different people who have been up to different projects. Again keep in mind that everyone is working out of their homes which is what makes this totally amazing.
There may be a couple more occasions in the office between 4:30 and the time I hit the sack however the bulk of the work is done between 7:00am - 4:30pm.
Bottom line is productivity in all measures has went up, agents and staff are engaged and even though we all work out of our homes we're all having a great time.
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