Is VR Training better than IRL?
Every business is different, so you first need to consider what VR can do to enhance the onboarding and training process. In addition to creating a welcoming environment, you can also use it to do meet and greets and office tours.
This can create a more relaxed atmosphere for new recruits who are just learning the ropes. It can also help foster a feeling of community, which is a major selling point for new employees.
VR also helps employers learn more about new employees by allowing them to participate in activities that highlight their strengths and weaknesses. That way, upskilling and reskilling programs can be tailored to focus on areas that need improvement.
Benefits of VR Training
Aside from making onboarding a more pleasurable experience, VR can also help to improve an employee’s earliest days at a new job. Since the first few days are when a new employee forms their first impression, it’s important to make the onboarding process as streamlined as possible.
In addition, VR also offers a variety of other benefits, which include:
Makes Onboarding Fun
Most people automatically associate virtual reality with fun. So, when it comes to using it for onboarding and training, it can make learning material feel less tedious and repetitive. Instead, it creates a place where employees feel more relaxed and communicate freely.
Highlight Your Company’s Strengths
Enhanced Training Options
It’s a proven fact that people retain more information and learn more when they’re having fun. And since there’s no pressure, they’re also more likely to want to learn more often and for longer intervals.
That said, companies that choose to use VR for onboarding, in addition to other training sequences, usually reap the rewards of higher levels of ROI and also higher levels of productivity overall.
VR Allows to Create Personalized Experiences
As important as onboarding is, it can still feel like a tedious, never-ending task. When you use VR, you can create personalized experiences that every employee will remember.
For example, instead of sitting back in that gray cubicle, you could hold your onboarding sessions sitting under a virtual palm tree or on a snowy mountain top. In addition, new employees could learn about the company’s history by actually going back in time on a virtual tour
How to Transform the Onboarding Process with VR
If you’ve been thinking about implementing VR into your onboarding processes, here below are three ways to make the transition easier.
Gamification
Virtual reality takes the gamification onboarding process a step above flashy badges and scoring points. With interaction gamification, you can showcase your organization and make long-winded onboarding processes more personalized and more engaging.
For instance, if you could take a boring PowerPoint presentation about your company’s policies and turn it into a fun quiz show, would you do it? Employees would be more engaged and eager to participate, even when it’s about a not-so-interesting topic.
One of the top reasons new hires resign or quit within the first six months of hire is due to miscommunication between themselves and the company. It’s not uncommon for new employees to feel like an outsider and not like part of the team.
What’s worse is that in-person team-building activities usually don’t work out the way you would like. Thankfully, this is where VR can help. With increased interaction between employees and possibly management, it’s easier than ever before to bridge the gap and let new employees have an inside look into the company culture.
Functional Training
Jobs that are high stress, require using complicated machinery or are considered dangerous would benefit from virtual training modules. For example, health care professionals can use VR to create simulated situations to train new interns, nurses and surgeons.
But virtual reality implementation isn’t only for these industries. VR can also help when you’re onboarding your marketing, sales and customer service teams.
Roadblocks to Using VR for Training
Companies that choose to use VR as part of the onboarding process could impress candidates who want to work for tech-savvy organizations. However, even with all the benefits of using VR, there is a downside as well. Startups with a small budget might not have the capital to implement VR for onboarding purposes.
In addition, there’s always a risk of accessibility issues as well. With that said, the future of employee training needs to focus on what’s best for the employee as well as the company.