KUALA LUMPUR: When the pandemic hits, the lines between work and life feel blurred, which generates an uncomfortable sensation of paradoxes not to just our talents, but also everyone else who is working from home. This cognitive dissonance has unquestionably altered the environment to the point where there is no turning back, even to adjust. This has caused a tremendous negative effect to our mental health.
Forest Interactive takes the wellbeing of our talents seriously and believes in creating a welcoming environment for them to thrive. With our talents having decreased face time and being unable to check in physically with each other, we needed to think of new ways to engage our employees and bring them closer together again.
This is when Sheena Pimentel, our former Head of Corporate PR, learned about Gather.Town during one of the most trying moments for all of us back in September 2021 and entrusted me (then an intern) to recreate Forest Interactive’s KL HQ in 2D space, allowing the Forest talents to once again engage with each other, in a virtual setting.
Gather.Town is a web conferencing software that combines key features of meeting programmes like Microsoft Teams or Zoom with the visual style of a late-1990s video game. This platform was created with a little twist, of added component of seeing the virtual “room”, and the ability to move around and interact with other participants based on your locations in the room, just like in real life.
The initial goal was to hold a virtual team-building event, on a fun and interactive platform. Seeing that this idea emerged during the pandemic, it was a challenge for me since I have never been to the physical KL HQ office.
However, my coworkers Zulaikha Suhaimi and Zuliana Dardiri as well as the entire Corporate PR team assisted me in visualizing the actual office, allowing me to accurately depict the floorplan and layout of our KL HQ on Gather.Town.
The fact that Gather.Town uses a 32×32 pixel size makes the process extremely delicate and I had to take great care of it while also deleting or adding items to the map. Throughout the entire map-making process, I picked up a lot of strategies and techniques to navigate in the mapmaker. Some tips I can share are to pay great attention to details. Every object was handpicked and some objects were specially customized by me while ensuring it does not look distorted in the map. This includes the beanbag, room signage and temperature checker which was widely implemented during the pandemic.
Additionally, Clinton Geissler from the Gather team led us on a virtual tour of the company’s headquarters. It was a very good session as we got a better insight into what is Gather and how to utilize it better within the company.
Forest Interactive’s Virtual Office was officially launched during the International Coffee Day event, where more than 50 talents from across the globe enjoyed conversing with one another as they would in an office setting while learning new things about coffee.
Our talents had the freedom to design their own avatars and populate the simulated environment so they could interact with others, hold meetings, and even plan and take part in internal activities like playing piano music or playing games.
Whenever I popped into Gather, I could see pockets of people chatting just like they would have in the physical office. Some departments even began holding meetings in the space and had mini get togethers. The Virtual Office was eagerly embraced, especially by the newer talents who joined during the work from home era and provided them with a welcoming office environment that just video conference calls could not emulate.
Due to the high success rate and great feedback, it inspired us to expand the space and add-in to our other offices around the globe, allowing for unprecedented cross border interaction for our 260 talents. The amount of time invested into this project was more than 200 hours to ensure the “Virtual Offices” had an identical look and space of the actual offices in their respective countries.
On the platform, we also hosted birthday and farewell celebrations, workshops, and virtual tours! When we held student empowerment programmes; Malaysian Future Leaders School programme (MFLS) and our own flagship program #seKODlahxCIMB, the participants were given a tour of the virtual workplace and got to play games in the realistic setting. They found the tour to be enjoyable and were intrigued by the idea of a virtual and game-like office environment.
Forest Interactive constantly strives to put innovation at the forefront of its company operations, as well as for its talents and future innovators. This was a wonderful experience for me to be able to take charge of a project and allow my creativity to flourish. Thank you for believing in me, and continuously pushing all of us, to be the best version of ourselves.
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