Using Virtual Reality (VR) in Training Optimizes the Employee Onboarding Experience

In part three of our Small Business Week series, we step into the futuristic world of virtual reality and help you determine if your business needs this technology.

Virtual reality (VR) is going to be increasingly available and used by enterprises and consumers in the next five years.

Is investing in VR a good decision for businesses though?

Approximately 13.1% of small- and midsize-business owners are already using VR, and 13.3% plan to use it within the next two years, according to a 2018 survey on top technology trends.

VR is still a ways from being widely adopted, but there is potential for businesses that have a solid business case for its use. This is not something that small businesses should use just because it’s cool, but rather they should use it if they can prove their audience already owns VR headsets (in the case of marketing) or they can provide and maintain a VR platform for internal use (in the case of training).

In this piece, we’ll take a look at how one company uses VR to boost its training capabilities and what questions you should ask yourself before investing in VR at your business.

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Virtual-reality-training innovations in real life

Although Pixvana provides VR solutions to other businesses, the use case here is innovative for where it was implemented.

“With the ship almost always at capacity and occupied by either customers or the cleaning crew, finding a window of time to manually train new employees was a major challenge,” reports Turner.

Using VR to train individuals in incredibly small spaces with limited time is a great use of the technology.

“The new interactive VR training video enables new employees to master the massive 105-table, 12-serving-station dining room in a fraction of the time—without the internet or access to the actual room.”

Should you use virtual reality?

Virtual reality has many possible applications, ranging from training, like in the example above, to advertising products in a real environment. All one needs to advertise a product in VR is a 360-degree camera and some video editing know-how.

But, if you want a high-quality VR experience for a product or program for your business, whether for internal or external clients, you need to ensure that the investment outweighs the cost.

For instance, the cost of developing a VR training experience was less than shutting down a cruise ship dining room to train new staff on an ongoing basis.

Information on Capterra’s Top Technology Trends for SMBs survey

Capterra conducted this survey in June and July 2018 among 715 U.S.-based small and midsize businesses (SMBs) with more than one employee and annual revenue of less than $100 million. The survey excluded nonprofit organizations. The qualified respondents are decision-makers or have significant influence on the decisions related to purchasing technologies for their organization.