As acting chief marketing & experience officer at SHRM (the Society for Human Resource Management), Tina Beaty has a front-row seat when it comes to seeing how such tech innovations as the metaverse will affect people in the workplace.

SHRM, Beaty tells Doug Simon, is "the voice of all things work. So, we really look at the intersection between people and a business and helping to ensure that employers and employees can thrive together in today's economy and be ready for the future."

The metaverse, Beaty says, is "a really interesting environment," especially in the context of hybrid work. She tells Simon that it "presents maybe a unique opportunity to put folks who are spread out across the globe or coast to coast in one environment and engage, meet, brainstorm that way."

She says that two things stood out to her in D S Simon Media's "PR and the Metaverse 3.0" report, which surveyed senior executives. "The first one was just that we are headed towards a $1 trillion industry." The other was the higher adoption of the metaverse for B2B users as opposed to B2C.

As regards internal comms, Beaty says that the metaverse "is a fantastic opportunity" for companies "to put their employer brand out there. They could be using the metaverse in recruiting opportunities. They could then shift their focus to retention strategies and bring employees across a myriad of different offices or departments together for a training, for L&D, to engulf people again in that brand."

She also stresses looking at the metaverse as a work in progress. "Employees as much as the employers need to be willing to test and innovate as these new technologies come online, as they become available, let's figure out together how we can utilize the tech, because the technology is only as great as how we're going to use it to bring people together."

After a tour of Metaverse 3.0, Beaty says that she saw plenty in the way of possibilities. She "loved how easy it felt to navigate. As a marketer, I saw great potential for signage, for the ability for logos and storytelling, again, to kind of create that environment that we don't get with the more static tech like a zoom call."

To keep employees happy and productive in the high-tech workplace, she says, it's important for "companies across all different types of industries and sectors re-evaluate what makes sense for their business type. It's going to be different for every company. And that's why it's great."

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