The 5 benefits of using VR for your onboarding process

When preparing your new hires for their job you need to set them up with a lot of information as fast as possible. They need to know what will be expected of them and what the company’s culture is like. They should get to know their team members and the CEO. Yet, how can you cover so much ground in just one day? VR is the answer.

There are many reasons why VR can provide an optimal onboarding process. In this article we will give you the five main benefits of using VR for onboarding.

Walmart is the leader when it comes to VR training. They have rolled out their VR program to roughly 4,600 stores to help train more than 1 million employees. This has lead to great success and rising test scores. The reason why VR is such an effective training tool is because VR enables companies to stimulate real-life scenarios with immersive video and audio. This helps new employees to become familiar and comfortable within the environment prior to being thrown into it.

This is especially relevant for future employees that will work in high-risk work environments, like firefighters. By using 360° and VR content, you can create experiences that will teach your new employees to identify potentially dangerous situations. Through this method you can quickly bring your new employees up to speed both safely and efficiently.

It is hard to keep someone’s full attention. Especially on someone’s first day they can get distracted by all the new things they see. With VR you are much more likely to maintain the engagement of the viewer as you are in control of the content your employees see with their VR headset. In addition, research shows that memory retention after a VR experience is 2x higher than after viewing video- or text-based learning materials. UPS has seen their retention rate climb to 75% since adding VR.

One of the reasons is that human memory is anchored and made stronger by multi-sensory and emotional input. In VR people are “present” in the moment which increases emotional responsiveness and therefore memory retention.

Human beings are inconsistent, which can get in the way of presenting a consistent image of your company. Training your new hires on a bad day can lead to not covering all points, rushing through, not giving the right tone or the right message to your new employees. By transferring onboarding to VR, you can film the best version of the process just once and use it to deliver a consistent message.

If you ever experienced well-made interactive VR content you know how engaging it is. This engagement is a great way to excite new employees and to stand out from the crowd. In a research, 49% of millennials said they want a better onboarding experience and 82% said high tech offices will influence their opinion of their new job. In addition, 58% of global millennial workers prefer high-tech in-office perks such as VR and AR over free snacks and ping pong tables.