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b"There\\u2019s not a lot of good coming out of the current situation affecting the globe, but if there is an upside, it\\u2019s the rare opportunity to learn from something this unprecedented. Through her work with National Research Group, today\\u2019s guest Lauren Xandra has been able to study newly-emerging work-from-home behaviours, and how that applies to XR adoption.\\n\\n\\n\\n\\n\\n\\n\\nAlan: Hey everyone, I'm Alan\\nSmithson from the XR for Business Podcast, and today we're speaking\\nwith Lauren Xandra, vice president of strategy and innovation at\\nNational Research Group, a leading global insights and strategy firm,\\nabout the original research on XR, AR, and collaborations in a time\\nof Covid-19. All that more coming up next on the XR for Business\\nPodcast.\\n\\n\\n\\nLauren, welcome to the show.\\n\\n\\n\\nLauren: Thank you so much for\\nhaving me, Alan.\\n\\n\\n\\nAlan: It's my absolute pleasure.\\nI'm in day 22 of my quarantine. Nothing really has changed in my\\nlife, because I work from home anyway. So how are you doing?\\n\\n\\n\\nLauren: I'm doing well. It's a\\nhealthy adjustment for me, but it's rather timely that we're here\\ntoday, because I'm excited to share new research, looking at how\\ndifferent demographics are adapting to our work-from-home reality,\\nand to share some exciting findings that we see in the space with\\nnew, broader, addressable audiences for virtual solutions in light of\\nall of this.\\n\\n\\n\\nAlan: Well, the timing on this couldn't be any better. Some dedicated, hard-working people in this industry have banded together this week to pull together an XR Collaboration guide, talking about everything from security to device management to vendor selection to feature lists, and really put a lot of effort into creating a tool online that will give people the opportunity to figure out how these tools can be used for their business or school or education, and which one is the right one for them at the time, for the need they have. And so we're really excited about that, and the information on that will come out on XRCollaboration.com. So, Lauren, please tell me, what is the basis of this study?\\n\\n\\n\\nLauren: Sure. So, when suddenly\\nmillions of people -- seemingly overnight -- became remote workers,\\nwe're faced with these huge questions about productivity, state of\\nmind, social and cultural impact of the situation, and the lasting\\nimpact, too. We really set out to understand how people are adapting,\\nwhat pain points are felt across work-from-home, and in doing that,\\nwe can better understand and address whitespace to solve for these\\npain points, to ease our adjustment to this new -- and bizarre --\\nreality.\\n\\n\\n\\nI'd love to walk you through some of\\nthe key findings, perhaps starting with generational differences in\\nadapting, and then perhaps looking at more industry-specific\\nchallenges and opportunities.\\n\\n\\n\\nAlan: Sounds wonderful. Let's\\nlet's dig in.\\n\\n\\n\\nLauren: So we see that the\\npre-Covid-19 context really impacts different generations' concerns\\nand expectations for the future. Probably one of the most\\ncounterintuitive insights is that the youngest in the workforce is\\nactually the least well-equipped for work-from-home. The digital\\nreliance of this generation already makes them victims of social\\ndistance pre-Covid-19, and for them, the effects of isolation are\\namplified. The impact of Covid-19 on culture is really their\\nfront-of-mind concern. And here we're thinking about culture in terms\\nof how we connect, how we collaborate. Gen Z has really struggled to\\ndisconnect from technology. They're citing irritation from too much\\nscreentime, bad work/life balance, well ahead of other groups. And\\nthis impacts mental health, with already about half of Gen Z\\nprofessionals saying that staying"