When we heard that our friend David Cairns – a former champion poker player turned commercial real estate broker, needed a place to dial into the Metaverse we got excited about producing this short film introducing his perspective on workplace futures and relating what our Event Studio offers for media experiences.
David Cairns (SVP, CBRE) is a content creator focused on examining the ‘future of work’ who has recently launched a roundtable discussion series in the Metaverse using a platform called Virbela Open Campus.
Hosted with Chris Moeller from Orion Growth, ‘Inspired People, Inspired Places‘ is David’s weekly online gathering that seeks to give participants new ways to interact whilst regularly discussing topics to do with how workplaces are changing.
Photos from the session
Film Transcript
We’re here right now in the StartWell media studio. It’s an incredible prolific space with just really great energy. I’m conducting roundtable discussion series. In the metaverse and a platform called Virbela. The title of our of our series is called inspired people inspired places. The notion being that all that’s required to have an inspired place, whether that’s physical or digital are inspired people.
I’m Dave Cairns. I’d call myself really more content creator on the future of work and living than I would a commercial real estate agent. But I kind of moonlight as a real estate agent.
I’m a believer in the distributed work movement that is taking shape. And I think that the answer to that equation is offering spaces of service and a multitude of ways.
And to plug you StartWell, I mean, you guys are at the bleeding edge of a really important aspect of meeting the needs of dispersed teams, which is to bring people together and intentional ways to gather basically not not to work alongside but to gather.
I’m one of the cofounders of the of the platform along with one of my good friends, Chris Moeller, we’re obviously partnered up directly with Virbela and their open campus team, which had been just really great support for us to be able to bring this conversation to life, we’re conducting it in a virtual environment for a couple of key reasons. One is there are elements of interacting in this virtual capacity that I think bring out really good human qualities, you’ll find that people really are coming to these conversations with a lot of mutual respect, and wanting to hear people out. And I just love that about it. But when I think of my life over the last three years, predominantly doing these kinds of things over two dimensional zoom call, I mean, this virtual world is like night and day better.
There’s no comparison in my mind to how much more engaging that conversation can be in a virtual environment, you have the feeling of being among the people that you are participating in the conversation with, which I’ve just found doesn’t come through in the same way through a zoom webinar, it is cool, to be able to secure more being in what would otherwise be a physical space with a group of people. You can’t do that on Zoom. But you can do that in the Metaverse platform. And it’s very compelling. I think this environment is still pressing on, I think that as time goes on, it’s going to be part of the platform of work. And companies are going to make further investments in my belief in these virtual environments.
And, you know, a place is just a place unless it’s activated by a group of people that are there for a shared purpose and you want to carry an important conversation forward. It doesn’t matter whether that’s happening in person on Zoom, or in a virtual environment.
To me, like media is also part of the platform of work, the personal brands of the employees of an organization are starting to actually become more valuable than that of even the corporate brand itself, they may have something that they want to bring to life, which is best done through, you know, spaces that are adequately set up for media.
So like, I think what’s happening in this whole future of work conversation is, is two things are really at play. One is that coming into an office environment is more representative of a drop in experience for the average employee than it is a place where you just go and type away for eight hours. But the other thing is it’s actually to execute on really intentional pieces of work. And this is one of them, obviously for me right now.
So to be able to come into a professional environment and get the benefit of like levelling up what I’m doing. I think it’s a no brainer that every organization in the world should be looking for ways to to prop up their employees to do more of that.
Thanks StarWell…
