Current times have brought in high volatility in the job market and have made the economy dubious. And yet, organizations are still adding employees and contractors to fuel their growth and mostly, to ensure survival. The speed and effectiveness at which an employee gets onboarded from being a novice to becoming a contributor can be the competitive differentiator in today’s market.
An organization makes a significant amount of investment to hire the right person, but this gets written off due to the ignorance of an impactful onboarding program. According to research conducted by a reputed global marketing firm, Aberdeen Group, 90% of the employees make their decision to stay with the company in the first 6 months. This is a key insight that conveys the criticality of an effective onboarding program in organizational growth, not just human resources KPIs.
While many technologies have come and died out in this process of employee induction and training, immersive tech – Virtual Reality (VR) in particular, is ‘The One’ that will stay in practice for a long time to come. To support this, here are our analogies on ‘How VR is making the employee onboarding program easy, convenient, and appealing in the near future.’
Dependency on experts is out of the equation!
One of the important reasons for mass recruitment programs in an organization is the dependency on expert resources to conduct one single formal onboarding program for all at the same time. Each expert brings his or her part of experience, knowledge, and learning on the table, which gets disseminated presently through online/offline classroom sessions.
Virtual employee onboarding process allows such an organization to reduce this dependency to quite an extent by recreating presentation (Powerpoint or Keynote) modules into immersive, interactive virtual content. A significant amount of cost, time, and effort gets subsidized by reducing the dependency on visiting experts from this equation. With added role-play simulation, virtual employee induction program allows the onboarding journey to be more personalized for each individual employee.
No geographical barriers
Many MNCs have been struggling with this challenge of imparting their plant/factory/industry/facilities information; all of which needs to cover the processes, products, equipments, etc., in order to orient the employees sitting at the corporate office or any part of the world. A significant amount of cost, time, and effort goes into tackling this orientation.
Though some means have been derived to address this need through learning videos, the extent of focus and immersion is moot. VR maneuvers through this problem smoothly. With virtual onboarding programs, most of these challenges can be addressed without any limitations, and new inductions can ‘move’ around and navigate their workplaces virtually.
Assess the learning curve
An important element of the onboarding program is also to assess the employee’s learning curve. Analytics built into these virtual employee induction programs provide richer insights into employability and risk assessment. The technology allows you to assess the employee in various fields and scenarios, and test his or her learning in a simulated use-case. It also generates an insightful report that is unique to each individual resource.
The next level is to use analytics to generate big data insights and reports allowing field experts to assess the performance of the VR modules itself. This eventually allows the HR team to make a conscious decision of when to update VR modules and content.
Virtual Reality (VR) is revolutionizing the onboarding program at different levels in an organization. Not only is it making the virtual employee onboarding process cost-effective with time-saving, but is also improving the learning curve of every individual employee. A recent study shows that VR learning modules have 2X content retention as compared to conventional learning videos.
At an industry level, there are many more specific use cases and benefits of virtual reality or VR for training, or learning and development. If you are looking for a remote solution that helps in onboarding individuals across your organization, acclimatizing them to the organization’s knowledge, workflows, and operations, you have reached the right team at Xarpie Labs.
Write to us at hello@xarpie.com for your specific queries.
Reference:
- Transforming employee onboarding with virtual reality
Video Credits: Strivr