in organizational psychology, explains. But if you’re
working on your laptop from home or at a local café, is
the actual design of the virtual space even important?
Howland is unequivocal: ‘What the room looks like
matters. If you put ten people in the auditorium, there
will be less communication than if you put those same
ten people in a small conference room.’ Just as in the
real world, different kinds of spaces will induce different
kinds of social interactions. ‘We used to have dark rooms
for people to meet in and people complained it felt
depressing,’ Howland adds. Besides the auditorium, eXp
World offers a variety of meeting environments, includ-
ing high-rise offices, waterside glass-fronted pods and
outdoor seating. The soccer field, by the way, is handy
for stand-around chats – letting other people know they
may join in. Employees have also used it for self-organ-
ized group exercise classes: they project workout videos
on the stadium screen and all do gym from home.
Doug Wormhoudt, co-founder, with Idan Beck,
of the online collaboration platform Dream, which
launched last October, asserts that to be conducive to
work, a virtual environment must be ‘relaxing but not
too fantastical’. If the designers at eXp World have »IT SEEMS IRONIC that one of the first companies to
entirely replace bricks and mortar with virtual offices,
deals in bricks and mortar for its bread and butter. If,
however, you consider the evolution of office design,
from the cubicle to the open-plan office to the ever more
common hot-desk, as the pursuit of maximum produc-
tivity – and therefore profitability – per square metre,
then eXp Realty’s decision to forego physical offices
begins to make more sense. CEO Glenn Sanford founded
the real estate brokerage in the wake of 2007’s US hous-
ing collapse. Unable to afford the expense of real-life
offices scattered across the country – or risk another
property price plunge – he sought an alternative to rent-
ing or buying buildings for his employees to work in.
You only need look at the number of laptops in
your local café or the growing number of co-working
spaces in cities to know more and more people today
are working away from an allocated office. According to
a 2017 Gallup poll, by 2020 three quarters of Americans
will work on mobile devices. The capacity to work
from afar and connect to the internet means that 43 per
cent of the US workforce currently does some work
remotely; 20 per cent does so all the time. Factor in the
escalating costs of living in urban centres and innova-
tion hubs – so much so in the case of Silicon Valley
that employers, including Oculus and Mozilla, now
prefer to recruit remotely for economic reasons – and
the need for tools that enable people to work off-site,
dispersed, but still together almost seems obvious.
Expanded Horizons
Sanford’s solution to the problem is eXp World. Devel-
oped with California-based software company VirBELA,
and launched in 2016, eXp Realty’s headquarters is a
virtual online world similar to Second Life. The digital
relocation has proven to be a major growth engine:
since eXp World’s launch, eXp Realty’s stock price has
surged and having had 6,500 agents at the start of 2018,
the company now boasts 14,000. A significant number
of employees spend between 20 and 30 hours a week
in eXp World. There, they attend meetings, training
sessions, receive technical support and collaborate on
cloud-based documents.
Getting to eXp World is easy: viewed onscreen,
you just download the software to your computer and
customise your avatar. Before you know it, you are in
leafy surrounds on a sunny, low-fidelity campus marked
by two iconic skyscrapers, various low-rise buildings and
a riverside forecourt, as well as by a beach, a soccer field
and a pirate ship. Walking around – done by pressing the
arrow keys on your keyboard – is like strolling through
a theme park. There is no dirt, traffic or ambient noise.
All you hear are chirping birds and human voices that,
thanks to 3D distributed audio, get louder or quieter as
you get closer to or further away from other avatars. And
if you don’t want to walk, you don’t have to: a dropdown
menu will teleport you to any building; clicking on a map
of the USA at Brokerage Operations will take you to any
state office. eXp World is even fun. On a day in late Octo-
ber, the campus is peppered with spiderwebs, pumpkins
and witch’s hats. You can also go on a scavenger hunt:
click on any one of nine owls hidden around campus and
they’ll reveal a company core value.
Behaviour Change
Beyond its whimsicality, the virtual world has some
distinct behavioural advantages over the real one:
‘Introverted people tend to be more comfortable in the
avatar environment. They find it easier to “lean into”
conversations that they might not typically “lean into”,’
Alex Howland, CEO of VirBELA, who has a background
EXP WORLD
The virtual campus of eXp Realty is the primary connecting
point for the company’s 14,000 staff. The campus offers a
range of different environments, from meeting rooms and
auditoria to sports fields and beaches.FRAME LAB 149