Openness to the Metaverse Workplace: Zoom Fatigue and Metaverse Information Seeking Mediate Gender Inequities

The metaverse—a network of three-dimensional virtual worlds in which people can engage in everyday activities—could augment future workplaces given the widespread acceptance of remote work. While it is not fully conceptualized, many have experienced, observed, or learned about metaverse-related technologies (e.g., online gaming and virtual reality), which will likely influence their openness to using the metaverse for professional purposes. In order to understand what the future of such remote work may look like, our exploratory research proposes that openness to the metaverse workplace (OMW) predicts the eventual adoption of this impending technology. We conducted a survey-based study (N = 604) to examine how OMW and (in contrast) openness to metaverse entertainment (OME) relate to differences in gender, videoconferencing fatigue, and metaverse information seeking. We found that OMW was positively related to OME. However, OMW ratings were lower than OME, and gender differences in OMW and OME were mediated by videoconferencing fatigue and metaverse information seeking. These findings extend the literature on mediated communication in professional contexts and suggest that the metaverse workplace will suffer from gender inequity, at least in the near-term future.