Some VR training benefits companies see as cost-savings, operational efficiency, employee engagement, and overall profitability.
VR training benefits an Organization can enjoy
1. Increase speed to proficiency
It must be done consistently at a large scale and efficiently to provide a competitive advantage. Because VR training can replace instructor-led or on-the-job training, it is a cost-effective way to reduce training time without compromising effectiveness and engagement.
Walmart wanted to offer in-store pickup via a new technology called the pickup tower. Still, they needed to ensure a great customer experience. Walmart could not afford varying pickup times or long waits for pickup.
An associate can train in VR before any equipment is installed. This allows them to make virtual use of the best instructors. This reduces business operations disruptions and cuts training time from eight hours to fifteen minutes.
2. Enhance customer service
Customer satisfaction is dependent on many factors. One of these factors is customer-facing employees who are well-prepared. Customer service agents benefit from VR training because they can practice on-demand learning the processes to be productive and effective, as well as the empathy, communication, and communication skills to deal with all customer types, from frustrated to curious.
Major financial institutions have a lot of emotional and difficult conversations with call center agents. It is important to navigate these situations well and show customer empathy to be satisfied. The main benefit of VR training is that it allows users to develop critical thinking skills and gain an overall view of customers' needs. This helps call center agents develop empathy and communication skills.
In less than six months, the financial institution could gain greater visibility into employee performance, identify training gaps and improve their customer service. This led to a 10% increase in customer satisfaction.
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3. Shorten onboarding time
A new employee must be able to contribute quickly after being hired. New employees benefit from VR training because it provides realistic training in a virtual environment replicating the real world. This helps new hires acquire the knowledge and skills they need faster.
Sprouts had to quickly hire thousands of employees in the wake of the pandemic. Even though protocols were being changed to ensure everyone was as healthy and protected as possible, they needed to do so quickly. It was crucial to have a faster and safer onboarding process to meet customer needs during a difficult time.
Sprouts cut the time required to train new hire value training from four hours to 45 minutes using VR solutions. This is an 81% reduction. Sprouts no longer need to rely on a group approach or travel for their hiring and onboarding needs.
4. Improve workplace safety
Employees must feel confident and ready to succeed in stressful situations. VR training allows mental repetitions in an environment that feels real, which makes it a great approach for critical moments.
Verizon wanted to offer realistic training to teach employees how to react to armed robbery scenarios. The company stressed safety for their customers and employees by teaching them how to manage their emotions.
VR training benefits Verizon associates by allowing them to experience the crucial steps of de-escalating high-risk moments and making the right decisions under pressure. VR training helped 97% of Verizon associates feel prepared for dangerous situations in real life.
5. Reduce turnover
Training in VR can give candidates, and potential hires a real-life job preview, which reduces turnover and increases retention rates. The headset exposes them to the sights, sounds, and atmosphere of their future work. They arrive mentally and physically ready to take on the job.
Global shipping companies have seen loading dock workers leave at an extraordinary rate. This was often due to not understanding the nature of their work. Sometimes, new hires would leave the job they started on the first day.
VR training is a benefit to every employee in the company. All employees can see the same job experience. This has resulted in greater consistency and set the right expectations. The training has made new employees very excited and interested. Additionally, the company has seen a double in the retention rate of loading dock workers since the implementation of VR training.
6. Reduce incident costs
Better workforce preparation is a powerful way to make your workplace safer. This does not require you to read a manual. Companies can use VR training to help employees practice important job skills in a real-world setting. This experiential learning medium improves spatial and situational awareness. It also helps reduce incidents and costs for Strive customers.
Multinational food processors train their employees to be safe and efficient on the line and to practice safe behavior in virtual plant environments. VR training is an exceptional medium for experiential Learning. It transcends language and cultural barriers and can be used by managers and new employees for refresher training or onboarding.
It's a good business decision to introduce VR training. The direct and indirect savings far outweigh any initial hardware investment. Because your course has been developed, it is easy to scale it up. This eliminates the need for repeat courses and can save you money on trainer fees.
There are also tangible indirect savings by minimizing downtime and removing the need for production to stop. Furthermore, productivity can be increased by having more skilled and competent employees.
89% of employees felt safer after a short, immersive training session.
7. Enhance brand & scale culture
Onboarding is becoming more difficult as employees move away from their companies. This makes it more difficult to communicate brand values and engage them in the company culture. Learning & Development companies benefit from VR training because it provides real-world experience that reflects company values. VR is a great way to build brand consistency and enhance the customer experience for new and seasoned employees.
Sprouts can use VR training to help them scale their unique culture standardized while emphasizing the importance of customer service. The VR training helped 48% of employees understand the core values better than the 3% of traditional learners. This is a 16x improvement. Senior managers who were trained in the old paradigm even outperformed VR learners.
Read More: Location-based Virtual Reality (VR) is expanding its acceptance in the U.S.
8. Avoid business interruptions
Training can cause disruptions to normal business operations, removing an employee from the sales floor or allowing an aircraft to be taken off commission. Companies can benefit from VR training by having on-demand access at any time to high-value material and training in business flow.
Immersive Learning is a ground training program that allows ground personnel to practice A320 inspection. This helps them to recognize key errors on "dirty" aircraft and to instill the right order of things. Immersive Learning provides real-world training on planes that normally cost $10,000. This reduces the need to rent or take planes out of service for training.
9. Better Learning and performance
The 70/20/10 learning and development model emphasizes that people learn best from work-related experiences. 20% learn from others, and 10% from formal Learning.
Learning by doing is a much more effective and efficient way to learn new skills, retain information, and change behaviors. Virtual reality's potential to create a virtual space in which learners can gain hands-on experience with specific tasks is what makes it so powerful. It allows learners to make mistakes and get immediate feedback via performance-related metrics. They can also easily repeat exercises to increase their proficiency quickly. This includes:
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Technical training for highly skilled individuals
Virtual reality platforms have made it possible to create hyper-real environments. Complex technical tasks can now be replicated easily, allowing for training exercises that represent daily work practices. These virtual tasks allow learners to practice their skills, helping them build muscle memory, which helps retain information that can be applied in real life. Healthcare professionals can, for example, learn and practice complex surgical procedures in a safe environment. This will ultimately lead to better patient care.
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Process-driven skills
To improve efficiency and address process-driven skills, companies are using VR. Gamification allows employees to solve problems and learn in a fun, results-driven environment. Businesses can also use it to establish consistency across sites and countries.
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Training in business and soft skills
Recognizing the benefits of VR training in soft skills such as customer service, delivering speeches, and workplace behavior is becoming more common. VR eliminates the need to play uncomfortable roles with coworkers, leading to counterproductive Learning.
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Team collaboration
Furthermore, VR can enhance team performance through collaborative training experiences that improve workflows and give teams the space to discuss skills issues related to interdependent tasks.
9. Making impossible things possible
Many sectors, such as manufacturing, defense, oil and gas, healthcare, and aviation, do not allow Learning on the job. Practical training is difficult or impossible because of the hostile work environment, non-stop production lines, and life-threatening learning methods. In many cases, failure to be fully trained can have disastrous consequences.
These situations can be replicated using VR in a safe and realistic learning environment. VR allows you to practice high-skilled, risky tasks. Learning can be done efficiently and effectively by learners who can fail, learn from their mistakes, and then repeat the exercises. Learners can also work more confidently, reducing costly errors and making the workplace safer.
10. Accelerating the learning process
Time is business money. Employee productivity is increased when employees are trained quickly and efficiently. Fully immersive training experiences enable learners to acquire new skills quickly and retain them.
Virtual reality creates an environment free from distractions, allowing learners to learn faster and smarter. Microsoft's study found that the human attention span is shorter than that of goldfish. It also revealed that our ability to concentrate for eight seconds is the most common time we lose focus. This is not conducive to learning well. A VR headset allows us to block all distractions and focus on the task.
11. Remote accessibility and training: Great for your company, great for the planet
Virtual training has the advantage that it can be done anywhere in the world. Virtual reality is not dependent on employees being in the same space. This makes training easier for many employees as it can be done anywhere, even when training in a group.
Companies with multiple locations or countries can experience significant travel and accommodation cost savings. VR training also reduces the downtime required for employees traveling to their training. Reduced travel can also positively affect the company's environmental footprint.
12. Easier Onboarding
How fast employees are onboarded is a major factor in determining the return on investment. Virtual reality training allows multiple employees to be trained simultaneously, making mass recruiting simple. Remote workers benefit most from VR training, eliminating the need to interact in person. A company only needs to purchase headsets and VR training apps for its employees. They can learn more about the company and its roles from their desks.
13. It Lowers the Risk of Unexpected Events
Certain jobs can pose a serious risk to the employees' health. These jobs could include working in dangerous environments or operating machinery. VR training helps employees be familiar with workplace conditions before leaving work.
14. Lower Costs for Accidents
High-tech tasks like surgery, engineering, piloting, or operating limited-edition machinery can pose a risk to employees. They could result in the company incurring losses if something goes wrong. Employee efficiency is reduced by having a good working knowledge of technical tasks.
15. It's Affordable
All factors are constant. Traditional training methods do not have any economic advantage over VR training. Considering the upfront costs for equipment, software, and creating videos may seem daunting. There are few other costs unless you hire an independent contractor to train your employees. The trend toward virtual reality solutions is now mainstream. Headsets are not nearly as expensive as they were in the past.
16. It Enhances Skill Retention
Although traditional training is beneficial, it has its limitations. However, everyone learns differently, and your employees may not retain the information you have given them. A well-designed VR program can be a great way to help employees relive the things they forget or remember and give them a second chance.
17. It allows you to create surreal scenarios
Virtual reality has reached a point where virtually any environment can be recreated to look exactly like the real one. Imagine a company with limited supplies of the real thing but cannot afford to train without disrupting production. It can use VR to provide employees with an engaging experience.
18. Learn in a safe, controlled, and realistic environment
VR allows you to train realistically and safely without risking injury or expensive damage to expensive equipment. Some immediate applications illustrate this:
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Doctors can perform difficult procedures that they may not have done before
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Workers can learn crane operators without having to be in the crane.
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Firefighters can simulate fighting fires without risking their lives
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Learn how to deal effectively with active shooters and robbery by employees
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Staff can use the equipment to practice with new machines for food production.
Training participants can experience unsafe situations in immersive VR. They can also practice in virtual scenarios as often as needed to feel confident and prepared.
Employees can learn from mistakes and experiences and repeat the process using interactive training methods that videos and manuals can't offer. This is often difficult in real life and can put the organization at serious risk.
Read More: 9 ethical Issues with VR, we Need to Fix
19. Learn remotely and save time, money, as well as the environment
Employees are often required to attend instructor-led training at a particular location. Employees must often travel far and away from their office to receive instructor-led training. This is especially true when specialized training requires employees to fly to the site. Employees can learn immersively in their own offices or at home.
Trends in the workplace are leading toward a decentralized workplace. People can collaborate across vast distances via video calls or VR, which saves time and money. The cost of VR headsets is dropping; they can be bought for training and then used remotely. The training material can be downloaded and accessed from any location.
20. Increases recall and retention
Higher retention and recall rates are usually a result of higher engagement rates. Learning will be more effective if learners pay closer attention to what they are learning.
Research shows that VR experiences have a higher memory retention rate than text-based ones. The Education Psychology Review published a study explaining how VR can improve memory by increasing multi-sensory and emotional input.
This was illustrated by half of the participants viewing a 360-degree VR film of a motorcycle ride. The other half viewed a 2D video. Forty-eight hours later, a memory test revealed that the VR group did twice as well in the memory recollection tests as the video group.
21. Consistent and controlled exposure to stressful circumstances
The other benefit is that VR's emotional and physiological responses to stimuli are similar to real-life situations. Research has shown that VR can treat phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Patients can be safely exposed to stressful stimuli during a VR experience. This VR experience can reduce the fear and stress response over time.
The VR experience can be repeated easily, so subjects are exposed to different intensity levels. Therefore, the subject can gradually get used to stronger stimuli. You can turn any stressful situation into a safe VR experience by lighting a fire or dealing with angry customers.
22. Engaging training at scale
VR is a great way to train large numbers of employees effectively. Organizations had to choose between less efficient but more scalable options (e.g., videos and online courses) or effective but more expensive solutions (e.g., instructor-led and on-the-job training).
You can use data analytics to create AR/VR to determine who has completed the training and what their performance was. This data is crucial for L&D teams to show ROI and successful training modules.
23. Distractions Isolation
Keeping people motivated in online or in-person training sessions can be difficult. Learners can lose focus when constantly distracted by their phones and other distractions. Research suggests that our attention spans are decreasing. This makes it exciting to train in a distraction-free environment.
Employees can put on VR headsets to capture their full attention. The experience includes audio and visual stimuli. Users are completely immersed in the virtual environment, where they can learn distraction-free.
Learning is more enjoyable when there's no distraction. This leads to better retention and less training time.
24. Enhance skills through experiential Learning
Todd Maddox's whitepaper, which examines the science behind VR-enhanced learning, states that "virtual reality speeds up the development of mastery, expertise, and proficiency through repeated experiential learning that broadens engagement with multiple learning systems in brain in synchrony, and is scalable."
It has been proven that Learning by doing is one of the best ways to improve your skills. You can improve your skill faster if you do the task in a real-world setting.
Edgar Dale's cone of Learning states that after two weeks, the brain can retain 10 percent of what is read, 20 percent of what is heard, and 90 percent of what it does or simulates.
A second study from the National Training Laboratory found that hands-on Learning retained 75% of the students. In contrast, lecture-style Learning was only 5 percent.
For calculating the ROI of a VR project, it is important to consider VR as experiential Learning. Studies have shown that VR can provide the same learning experience as a documentary of 1.5 hours.
Additionally, the leap from learning a task by watching others perform it is greater than that between practicing it in VR and doing it.
25. Assessment of Skills and Data-driven Insights
How can you evaluate an employee's performance in a new role within the company? How can you assess performance using quantifiable data?
When evaluating the performance of a candidate or employee, human beings can be very different. You might be unaware of your biases, and questions may be interpreted differently by each person. Or, there may not be enough data to assess the candidate properly. People might also lie about their experience and qualifications, leading to more variation.
VR and immersive learning can determine if employees are the best fit for a role or set of jobs. It also helps to understand how managers and candidates would act in real-world situations if they were hired.
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Conclusion
Virtual reality allows you to learn in a realistic, safe environment. Virtual reality offers tangible benefits to individual learners. It streamlines workflows through team training and contributes to a safer workplace. It's not a gimmick; it's good business practice.
The VR application list continues to grow in length. These benefits are why VR is a must-have for your company's training program in HR. For the best results, you might consider involving a team of experts to help with the training process.
