When digital spaces are your place of business — and your coworker is a troll

The Future of Work is a growing field for tech startups and a handy, shorthand way to describe what our focus is at Areto Labs. Work spaces are not physical anymore, and this past year has accelerated the shift to remote work, which essentially means, digital work.

Our straightforward answer to this is our Coach product, which equips enterprise leaders with a little bot helper in their online workspaces, like Slack and Teams, to encourage engagement, communication, conversations and empathy building.

But there are many people working at companies where they are required to have public-facing roles, and have been doing digital work for a while now. Their challenges have gone unaddressed, because HR leaders and business executives don’t have the tools to deal with the challenges specific to their industry. People like journalists, politicians, social media content creators, influencers, celebrities, public figures and professional online gamers are examples of this. When the ideas out of the diversity, equity and inclusion space intersect here, we find Areto Labs well placed to help, based on our technology and experience solving this problem. Check out the following articles for further context and evidence of this trend and market evolution.

Under the bridge: a female journalist’s life among the sports troll army

“How do we make sure people in general, and women in particular, have some protection at work? First, it’s incumbent on every employer with public‑facing employees to be educated about the dynamics of online harassment. It’s inexcusable that I had to deal with two HR directors in a row who weren’t on social media, basically throwing up their hands and telling me there was nothing they could do. If there was a guy following me everywhere I went and standing outside my building yelling every day, my company would handle it. When it’s 500 guys on Twitter, I’m on my own.”

Platforms like YouTube have tried to combat harassment against women. It’s not working

“That online platforms function as workplaces for content creators and that harassment and abuse threaten their livelihoods is rarely addressed in discussions on platform regulation and the industry’s self-policing policies. Many of the users involved are financially dependent on ad revenue from their online streams or posts, making these platforms essentially their place of business.”

There have always been myriad tactics people who fear their power will be taken away use to suppress the voices and contributions of historically marginalized communities. Lately, those tactics have been deployed in digital communities, and have been enabled by how those communities function. When they’re successful, these tactics have disastrous effects: we lose the knowledge and contributions of critical voices who will make the world better — not to mention increase the profits and outcomes at companies and organizations.

But we can harness some of those same tools to amplify the good, too. And that belief is what drives innovation at Areto Labs.

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