How Virtual Reality can enhance employee experience

Getting real with VR

Companies like Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook and Atlassian allow their employees to work from home. The finance sector may be next – and not only during the pandemic. Feasibility studies are underway to see if this could be a permanent solution, potentially saving billions in real estate and other fixed costs.

How can these companies ensure their employees share a similar set of values and behaviours, or a common corporate culture?

At The Tantalus Group, we believe that Virtual Reality, or VR, has the potential to create a powerful experience for employees.

Imagination at work

Imagine your journey. You are welcomed to a job opportunity by the CEO of the company of your dreams. He personally walks you through the company’s purpose, vision and values, then takes you into head office in San Francisco, London, Zurich or Sydney.

You can see and hear, and almost feel, the buzz of a creative and exciting environment. The CEO is kind and approachable.

Your next meeting is with the head of Human Resources, who shares more about career development and performance management. Then you meet your hiring manager, and eventually a member of your new team. The atmosphere is electric as your new colleague shows you the team working together.

Visualise yourself contributing to something great

Later in your career, you experience similar environments, for promotion, for a lateral move into a new department, or even your retirement.

If this sounds somewhat dystopian, you really need to see it, and experience it, to believe that VR works.

WEF weighs in on the working from home

As background, the World Economic Forum (WEF) recently confronted companies, saying, “our work lives will not return to normal after the pandemic”.

In addition, despite some fatigue from working-at-home, WEF global employee surveys show that many do not want to return to the office.

So, how can employers make the work experience less daunting and address employees ‘fear of the unknown’? What can employers do to support digital transformation and ensure their employees are connected with the company’s cultural experience?

Or attract the next generation of employees with the company’s sense of purpose or positive impact on society?

How Virtual Reality delivers an office experience

Virtual Reality has long offered the opportunity to bring the experience to the user and immerse users in the situation within the digital world. While it is often associated with gaming, it has many applications for business. While a video is helpful to tell a story, VR takes it to the next level to allow the user the ability to experience the story and even ‘direct’ where it goes next – different scenarios will lead to different outcomes.

Make no mistake, the office environment is a big part of most corporate cultures. It’s where you learn a company’s unique language, share your experience with a team, and grow as a person. It’s where you see leadership in action, and where a company’s values come to life.

We have all worked for companies with a strong culture, and many of us have worked with companies with a weaker culture or perhaps one that is less aligned to our values. Personally, I have observed and experienced both – a company culture that values respect and encourages working together to help the advancement of one another (where employees are referred to as colleagues to make the point) vs a culture that promotes and rewards individuals with bad behaviour, leading by ‘the wrong’ examples.

“Providing a glimpse of the experience beforehand may be one way to get employees at large comfortable with returning to the offices permanently when the day presents.”

Imagine seeing yourself walk into the office on your first day back to post-pandemic working life through a Virtual Reality (VR) headset at the comfort of your own home and visiting different areas virtually to get the latest briefing on company updates, product knowledge and company initiatives…all this before your actual day of return.

How Virtual Reality can prevent work-from-home fatigue

Atlassian’s global survey released in October this year revealed 42 per cent of employees are working longer hours since the pandemic started. This is an issue for most.

For employee well-being, VR has the capability, if designed appropriately, to offer employees a virtual session on how to work during the pandemic to avoid being overworked, or share a quiz on lighter topics to break the monotony.

VR can provide a relatively safe environment for users to come into contact with things they fear, while remaining in a controlled environment. For example, returning to the office for the first time in the midst of Covid or following extended leave, operating highly complex machinery for the first time as well as facing the most common phobia, public speaking.

VR is also effective and efficient for communicating very complex messages. Such messages can be broken into parts and played over time to make them easier to understand. For example, VR can immerse the user into a 360 degrees interactive tour of how blockchain works or the future of renewable energy looks like, walking through the different parts at the user’s own pace and also enabling different scenarios to be played out depending on the route the user chooses.

VR has also been a useful tool to simulate real life situations. For example, by walking in the shoes of a customer or being in an underprivileged community or a victim of inequality.

Virtual Reality works in two main categories

Generally, VR works best in two main categories – learning new skills or practical applications.

A common message from the CEO to new and existing employees about the company’s purpose, values and culture can be delivered consistently and updated as required through one central content management system.

Yes, that is possible but there isn’t an ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution when it comes to utilising VR to communicate with your employees or stakeholders. Every company or organisation is different and different industries have different nuances. VR should not and does not replace other technology but is complementary to the existing channels of communication used.

According to the ‘Reworking work’ global study conducted by Atlassian, three experience factors of employees need to be taken into account to determine how to best support them: household complexity, role complexity and network quality. These are interesting areas that can be converted into different scenarios within the VR experience to accommodate the different profiles of employees for a longer term, sustainable engagement of employees.

“VR is not a ‘quick fix or a replacement’ and does require strategic thinking.”

Especially when it comes to real business applications, the technological aspect is usually relatively straight-forward as compared to strategising the ‘experience’ framework.

Is VR or AR a good fit for your business or organisation?

The following is a list of some of the many areas that need to be considered to ensure the successful launch and implementation of a VR and/ or AR application within a business:

• Openness to new ideas and way to thinking;
• Setting of clear objective or the main problem statement and defining what success will look like;
• Commitment of a main sponsor who will lead the project internally and an executive sponsor within management;
• Establishing early support and involvement from across the company and organisation including management, Human Resources, Technology, Risk, Legal and Compliance;
• Allocating sufficient budget and in-house resourcing or contact point/s for ongoing maintenance;
• Availability of a small focus group for testing purposes and to act as ambassadors;
• A robust decision-making process on the preferred way to managing content (in-house or outsource) over the long run – who is responsible.

VR and its sister technology Augmented Reality (AR) can offer interactivity with enhanced real-world environment but may or may not make sense for your company or organisation.

Can VR/AR help advance the way your company or organisation communicates and engages with your employees and clients?

Best way to find out is over a chat – simply send me a Linkedin message or email me.

Karen Khaw, Senior Consultant, The Tantalus Group, Sydney (Australia) karen@thetantalusgroup.com

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