How Virtual Reality Can Help Businesses Emerge Stronger From the Covid-19 Crisis
Over the past few months, our organizations have to reinvent themselves. Confinement and social precaution have brought instant changes to the way we work and interact.
While the need for technologies which facilitate remote working has clearly increased, training needs have also urgently emerged. But this dynamic is about more than remote working, it’s about finding new remote ways to reskill and upskill a workforce.
VR Training is the most efficient way for an organization to adapt quickly and react at the required speed and scale without any physical constraint and risk. Virtual Reality immerses workers in new situations, and speeds their acquisition of new skills (soft skills/hard skills) to face the post-pandemic era.
3 examples of real life Uptale Immersive Learning applications
The pandemic era has made us rethink the way we teach & learn, accelerating the shift to fully digital approaches in order to re-create the best of in-person learning. Using Uptale Immersive Learning Platform, large organizations such as Schneider Electric digitized their response to Covid-19 in the form of Virtual Reality Training experiences. In a matter of days dozen of companies deployed their 360° video trainings based to thousands of workers.
1. Scaling new protective rules in factories
To serve many of their employees (135.000+ in over 100 countries) Schneider Electric created an interactive and immersive training with Uptale in order to help re-start plants in the post-pandemic era. In this VR experience, learners are immersed in one of Schneider Electric’s retrofitted factories, and they learn to interact in this updated, safer environment.
2. Reskilling Salesforce: Improving sales techniques with mask wearing
A Big Retail company in APAC is currently working on a VR training experience with Uptale. The module’s aim is to reskill Salesforce employee on how to build client relationships while wearing a mask.
3. Teleporting to restricted locations to keep business continuity
Another benefit of VR is to bring the reality of the Field into the home. Organizations in supply chain, manufacturing, energy, waste management and other industries have seen their white-collar population stuck far away from factories, unable to analyze situations and take crucial decisions.
VR Teleportation enables new ways to communicate and introduce “Digital twins” into the workforce.
Indeed, Gartner predicts that half of large industrial companies will use digital twins by 2021, gaining a 10% improvement in effectiveness.
Immersive Learning offer wide possibilities: re-starting plants after COVID-19, improving sales techniques with mask wearing, carrying out hands-on chemistry lab work at distance for students, digitizing in 360 to reduce the need to travel, launching safety awareness campaigns before returning to work… replacing face to face training with remote VR training.
Remote learning is more important than ever
According to a Gallup poll, “organizations typically spend 11% of their budgets on training”. During a crisis, these employers tend to scale back their development efforts and neglect employee’s training and development. This is a mistake.
Organizations must be fully prepared to face all and any future disruptions and challenges. Workers across industries need more effective ways to learn and adapt. Employers need to grow their workers digital agility in order to be more resilient and flexible, and this starts with digital transformation.
Build a large scale workforce transformation strategy with Virtual Reality
Above all, digital formats enable workers to learn and train in parallel, from anywhere in the world, without physical bottlenecks and logistics. Among them, technologies such as Virtual Reality bring intelligence to the real physical world by augmenting it or digitizing it in the highest fidelity. These are great tools to empower humans to share knowledge, skills, behaviors needed to respond to global issues.
New technologies such as Augmented and Virtual Reality overall reply to a bigger problem. We live in a very fast changing world: people need to adapt to fast change, continuously, and get ready for all the future disruptions. May they be disease, technology, climate, war…
Listen to the podcast “The problem-solving power of VR and AR” with our CEO David Ristagno and Jeremy Dalton, Head of VR/AR at PwC UK. They discuss the important role these technologies have to play in helping businesses and wider society navigate the COVID-19 crisis.