With the onset of the pandemic majority of the workers started working from home. Though it took some time for everyone to find their work-life balance, surveys have shown that overall the productivity has remained strong for everyone from CEOs to junior employees. As the vaccination rollout takes speed, people have started thinking about whether they want to go back to the office or prefer remote work. A study by McKinsey highlighted that post-pandemic more than 60% of the employees want to either opt for a hybrid model or remain fully remote. The employees are taking the charge of their work schedule; in a survey by Flexjobs, 58% of the workers said they would switch jobs if they weren’t given the option to work from home.
Hybrid work is not a buzzword anymore. More and more companies are attempting to provide their employees with the flexibility of work location. The idea and degree of flexibility are not constant but are dependent on the workstream of the respective employee. Under the given circumstances, building and maintaining a dynamic hybrid work environment is something everyone is trying to comprehend. It requires a mindset and a skill set that is one level above the pre-pandemic work style.
As Wall Street Journal said, hybrid work necessitates a massive rethink for the managers. Leaders need to have emotional intelligence and resilience to manage a diverse set of needs, goals, work styles etc among the employees and the company as an entity itself. Recent surveys have shown that 59% of the hiring managers and 89% of executives reported a soft skill gap when it comes to communication skills, leadership and teamwork. With time these soft skills are becoming increasingly important, and then the question becomes, 'what can companies do to make sure their employees develop these essential skills?'
The answer lies in VR technology. Unlike traditional learning solutions like classrooms, e-learning modules and PowerPoint, VR offers an immersive experience by blending the physical and the digital world. A study by PWC concluded that VR learners were 275% more confident to act on the learnt material, which is a 40% improvement over classroom learners and 35% improvement over e-learners. VR learners are 3.75 times more likely to build an emotional connection with the content than classroom learners and 2.3 times more than e-learners.
Now that we have established the ability of VR to provide an accelerated solution for the soft skill gap today’s enterprises face, let’s look at how VR can prove instrumental in your company’s journey from a work environment mandated by an external force to a more structured and engineered hybrid work style.
VR is increasingly being used in office space. The enterprise solution will place the participant in the centre of a 3D environment which would enable better content understanding, collaboration and engaging experience for a geographically distributed team. One of these use cases is employee training sessions and below are the some of the ways VR is able to deliver better results.
1. Large scale capacity – As VR technology advances it is becoming more and more scalable. Enterprise solution allows companies to host events with up to 70 people in a single room. The scalability makes enterprise training cost-effective in conjunction with being an immersive and efficient mode of training.
2. Ability to accommodate different views – Soft skills are very important when it comes to dealing with cultural differences in a global company. What better way to deal with them than learning to deal with it in a culturally diverse participant group. By increasing the geographical scope, VR is able to accommodate different points of view concurrently. Such training sessions will promote all-round soft skill development among its participants.
3. Level playing field – VR is a platform where office workers and remote workers can work together such that no one would miss the side chat and everyone will feel integrated into the fabric of the company. This level field will ensure that the information received by everyone is uniform and the quality of the training does not suffer due to the different geographic locations of the trainees.
4. Persistent rooms – Unlike physical rooms, in a virtual office, you don’t need to rub off the whiteboards to get ready for the next meeting. Your training rooms will remain untouched until you decide to enter the space again. The continued presence of the rooms allows the members to revisit the material whenever and from wherever they want. Virtual rooms will give you the dual benefit of in-person interaction and the option of on-demand availability of the content.
5. Breakout rooms – Once you have delivered the main content to a large audience. You can create breakout rooms in the same space. In each breakout room, the groups can test their understanding by solving case studies or practising the new techniques in the adaptable virtual environment. As the breakout rooms will be in the same space the participants will be able to reach out to the hosts in an instant and will always have the training material insight.
Book a demo today to know how your company can get ready for the hybrid work using VR enterprise solutions. To read more about the versatile application of virtual reality please check out our other blog posts.
