Employers must continually search for the best and most effective methods to create happier, more engaged and more productive employees to meet their company’s objectives. My agency works with companies across several industries to design and develop engaging employee journeys, and we’ve employed a number of methods to accomplish this. Technology can offer many solutions, including virtual reality (VR), which I’ve noticed is increasingly working itself into the workplace with some great initial successes.
These successes have included many large companies that have used VR for everything from training for emergency situations to creating a more collaborative work environment. Let’s discuss three ways that VR can be integrated into the employee experience.
Hiring
In a competitive hiring market, employers need to have every advantage possible in getting job seekers’ attention. How can you give potential employees a sense of what it’s like to work on your corporate campus, in your office or with your team? One great solution for this is to use VR.
Many companies are already doing this by providing a sense of what it’s like to walk around campus, take an office tour or have a company meeting. If one goal of the recruiting process is to try to give applicants a taste of what their life would be like working for your company, a VR experience might just do the trick.
Keep in mind that you’ll need to make sure that your audience has a way to view the experience, since the whole point of using VR is that they won’t have to come to your office. One of the best ways to do this is to create a mobile app, which will give potential employees the best opportunity to view it. You also could use VR at career fairs or other places where you can supply VR headsets to potential applicants.
Onboarding
New employees have unique requirements in order to become productive as soon as possible and learn about their new roles and responsibilities. What’s more, people are increasingly working remotely — remote work increasing by 44% over the last five years alone. If you have a new employee who is also remote, you may have a real need for a technology solution that helps them feel more connected and allows them to immerse themselves in their work.
VR can help with this by providing environments where employees can interact with one another from any location around the globe. These VR environments can go well beyond video chats or conference calls to provide an increased level of interaction.
Start looking for areas where you know that your onboarding could use some improvements, and consider VR in your range of potential solutions. For workers who need to practice detailed and technical processes, VR can be the next best thing to real-world interactions. Even if an employee had a similar job somewhere else, chances are your processes are a little different. VR can help them experience this before you put them out in the field.
Training
In addition to initial onboarding, VR can be used for ongoing training and development for your employees. If you think this is only happening in small instances right now, keep in mind that Walmart trained more than 1 million people with VR in 2019 alone and purchased 17,000 goggles to do so.
Industries from retail to manufacturing, health care, oil and gas and more are adopting VR as a way to train for many things, including emergency situations. In a recent study, the University of Nottingham concluded that VR training for emergencies is more effective in the long-term compared to traditional methods like PowerPoint slides.
Using VR for training has several benefits for the workforce. For remote workers, it allows them to have a more immersive experience than most online training. For any employees, VR can help them visualize the end result and actually see what success looks like before they have to try it in the real world.
If you want to start using VR for your company’s employee training, follow these two steps:
1. Identify processes or areas where hands-on training is needed and/or where the ability to repeat a complex process multiple times is beneficial. These are good potential areas where VR can help.
2. Determine how feasible it will be to provide VR headsets and other equipment to the employees you’re training. It may be easiest to deploy VR training when the employees can come to a facility where you can provide the equipment. Or you can try to find opportunities to bring the equipment to them. If you can get groups of your employees to be in the same place at the same time, you can lower the barrier to entry.
Not only is VR effective when used appropriately in the workplace, but it probably isn’t going away anytime soon. With costs to purchase VR equipment going down, it will likely continue to be adopted by more companies. Also, as it becomes adopted more in the employee experience, I predict that we will see many more uses in practice.
Quelle:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2020/04/02/enhancing-the-employee-experience-with-virtual-reality/#5eb37a356454
Foto: Getty
