For many employers, the metaverse has been a source of stress and confusion. Yet for others, it’s an opportunity with some indisputable results.
The metaverse refers to a virtual-reality space in which users can interact with each other using avatars. In 2022 alone, the metaverse reached an all time high of 400 million monthly users, according to consulting company Metaversed.
For business leaders, that kind of adoption is making it increasingly difficult to deny the role virtual reality will play in their future. In fact, according to a recent report commissioned by telecommunications company Ciena, more than three-quarters of professionals said they would rather participate in the metaverse, as opposed to companies‘ current remote work tools.
At Bank of America, taking advantage of the metaverse’s capabilities started out with some experimentation, but the benefits have been well worth the effort, says Mike Wynn, the innovations and solutions design executive for the academy at Bank of America. Wynn has spearheaded most of the bank’s recent metaverse integrations since 2020.
„When we first went down the journey of virtual reality we were unsure whether or not this was going to be successful,“ he says. „We knew we needed to get some feedback from small groups as we piloted our rollouts, but one thing that we saw and heard immediately was excitement. The positive feedback was jumping out of people’s mouths.“
Since then, Bank of America has incorporated a number of different immersive tech options for workplaces. First, the bank started small: using VR technology to replicate classrooms for training. When that gained traction, they piloted an immersive team-building experience, where employees wore VR helmets and worked together to solve a puzzle in space. Now they’ve expanded into workplace wellness, offering a metaverse integration employees can use specifically to meditate or take a break from work without moving from their desk.
„You can get people to feel and to communicate in various ways,“ Wynn says. „It’s one of the many ways that we’re going to help make employee engagement better.“
Wynn recently sat down with EBN to discuss how Bank of America was able to navigate the complexities of the metaverse — and how other companies can, too.
When did you realize that investing in virtual reality and the metaverse was a good idea?
When you think about training in general, nobody is really excited about training. Nobody is saying, „What an amazing, engaging training I took today, let me let me tell my peers about this.“ But when we put people in a headset, that all changed. Suddenly everybody wanted to tell everybody what they did. And it wasn’t just their direct reports, or their partners or their peers; it was family members, too. They were talking about it at the dinner table! That was huge for us. We said there is something here that we need to continue to explore. And that helped us move the needle to getting a little bit more serious, which is when we really started to put a program together to truly try to lead in the virtual reality training space. Now, this year we’re building 20 additional modules to add to our library of 15, which just goes to show how committed we are to doing this.
There are still a lot of people who are hesitant about the metaverse. How did you manage employees‘ perception and their comfort levels?
We started with just having people trained in VR. With technology in general, there’s usually going to be some level of hesitancy, like „I hate this“ or „I’ve heard bad things about this,“ and that’s why you have to kind of roll these types of things out slowly. Because we started to get our people into VR training, as we started to do more collaborative things in the metaverse, they were already used to the technology. It wasn’t their first time seeing a VR headset or hearing about it — it was a journey for them as well.
At the end of the day, whether it’s virtual reality or artificial intelligence, these are just parts of what we use to teach people; they aren’t everything. So if somebody is not comfortable in VR, that’s perfectly fine. They don’t have to be in VR. We don’t force any of our people to use any technology that is going to make them feel uneasy. We give them options. If putting on a headset isn’t for them, there’s other options that we have that can still make them feel included in the process and still get them to participate in some way. So as an example, the facilitator can take someone who is comfortable in a headset and have their view cast onto the screen. That way people can participate and see what that person sees. The facilitator can then ask questions like: „What choice do you think they should have made there? And why?“ It’s not about forcing people to just put on a headset, it’s finding ways to still have great conversations and be inclusive.
Bank of America offers a meditative metaverse option, on top of their training and team building offerings. Why did you think that was important?
When the idea actually got first put on my table, I thought, there is no way I’m going to bring this up. How could I possibly get anybody to approve VR meditation? But once I went through it myself, I realized there was definitely something there. The metaverse is not just about letting me teach you and train you and give you information. It’s also about how I can make things better for you in some way. We wanted to figure out how we could get a little bit more comfortable and a little bit more innovative and one of the things we started to look at was VR meditation, which for us, was something that we could easily tie to mental health and help people kind of disconnect. A program where you could put somebody in a headset and now they’re on a beach or they’re on a lake — somewhere they’re forgetting about potentially stressful data.
With VR meditation, it’s all about getting the employee more relaxed and somewhat grounded so that they’re not somewhat anxious. Whether it’s that they’re having a bad day or just using it as a way to disconnect for however long, they can select whatever scene relaxes them the most and they’ve got several options to choose from. They can look around, maybe there may be birds flying overhead, there’s going to be a voice talking to them reminding them to breathe, and explaining relaxation techniques and things of that nature. When we were piloting it and putting people through the demo experience, what was incredible is that people were practically falling asleep in their chairs in a good way. They were just so disconnected and relaxed, that they actually did not want to get up. And so that again was a big sign that this could be beneficial for us to be able to put out there and give people that opportunity to disconnect.
How did Bank of America handle getting the equipment out to everyone who wanted it?
We started off super small, because we needed to go through some of the hiccups and the pain points of figuring out how to deploy this at scale. What made it easier is that people are so curious about this technology that we didn’t have to force them to do this; all we had to do was get a headset there. And all of a sudden, there’s people congregating around it, because they all wanted to try it. It really came down to us putting a plan in place to have an internal team who was going to be focused very specifically on immersive learning. And that allowed for us to have people that we’re going to figure out what it was going to take to put the technical pieces together in order to stand this up and what it was going to take logistically to get headsets for everyone, as well as things like how we were going to make sure that we were swapping out headsets as they get defective or when we got new ones and things of that nature. It really came down to us making a decision that we’re going to go beyond trying and dabbling and wanting to be the company that other people look at as the brand standard when it comes to innovation and immersive learning.
What advice would you give to those companies looking to your brand for help or for guidance?
You have to be honest about your current training — how people are reacting to it and the return on investment that you are getting. Because one of the things that typically gets brought up when folks talk about technology and specifically VR is: „Why should we pay for this? This is an added money that we have to put towards something.“ You have to first start looking at what you’re doing right now and how much money you’re spending on those traditional methods and what you’re getting out of it. Because what typically happens is we spend whatever resources we have on the traditional trends that we’ve deployed and because folks aren’t retaining information the way that we would like — either because it’s monotonous or it’s boring — it’s not as effective and you wind up building the same thing over and over again, year over year.
When you think about immersive learning, yes, there are certainly some sacrifices that you have to make upfront in order to stand it up and ultimately deploy it. However, the return on investment is huge. Because what it is going to result in is getting a lot more excitement and energy to train, which is ultimately what you want as a facilitator. And beyond that, people are going to start learning at a much faster rate. You can take a PDF or a PowerPoint presentation that’s over a thousand pages or you can put them in a VR training module for eight minutes. I guarantee you, they’re going to remember the VR experience way more than they’re going to remember whatever it is that you ask them to read. I’m not saying sprint and get 10,000 headsets and roll that out — begin figuring out how you can do some of these immersive things. Just don’t be afraid to start.
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Foto: Julia M Cameron from Pexels
https://www.benefitnews.com/news/how-bank-of-america-became-leaders-in-immersive-technology
