Challenge
Provide an immersive learning experience that encapsulated the process of face-to-face soft skills training that typically was carried out using actors, looking to improve consistency of training and increase objectivity of feedback, whilst reducing costs to deliver at scale across the organisation.
Use Case
Stress-related illnesses are on the rise across the UK. Increasingly, employees don’t feel equipped to deal with the demands of the modern work environment.
At the beginning of last year, Lloyds Banking Group looked to tackle this problem head-on with the use of immersive technologies to help develop their employees’ personal vitality and resilience.
The experience was designed to help employees at Lloyds Banking Group increase their emotional resilience – their ability to cope with stress and to bounce back from setbacks and uncertainty – as well as identify signs of low resilience in themselves and others. It was one of the first-to-market soft skills products that used immersive technology.
Proof of Concept
Make Real created a 5 minute experience based upon training around difficult conversations with material provided by Lloyds Banking Group. This showcased the sense of soft skills training in VR and highlighted the potential use cases, data metrics that could be tracked and the learning outcomes expected to be achieved with a larger piece.
Hardware
The final experience was delivered via Oculus Rift and Oculus Quest for the full VR experience but also via Oculus Go mobile VR headsets for lower cost and greater scaling opportunities across the training centres and Lloyds Banking Group branches nationwide. Furthermore CleanBox Technology VR headset hygiene boxes were deployed at each training centre to ensure each headset was clean before use.
Build
Within the experience, learners need to navigate workplace conflicts. With the backdrop of a company restructure, you need to move around an office and interact with colleagues to look for signs of stress and help improve their emotional state.
For the experience to be effective, it needed to have a sense of realism. That’s why Make Real lived-captured human facial expressions and used professional voice artists to create the content. By using the latest front-facing depth cameras on the iPhone X, we live motion-captured facial and mouth movements of the voice actors for a cost-effective way of creating realism.
Make Real put inclusive input design at the forefront of this project ensuring the experience was not only easy to use, but representative of everyone in the workplace.
Impact
Lloyds conducted a survey of 200 employees, to measure the impact of this VR experience. These learners gave is an overall score of 4.1 out of 5 when asked to rate the effectiveness of this training. Not only was the experience seen to be impactful in this way, but it helped Lloyds also achieve a £127,200 saving in their training expenditure in its first year.
The application was shortlisted for the following awards:
AIXR VRAwards 2019 “Best Enterprise VR Solution”
Learn Tech Awards 2019 “Best Use of Virtual Environments for Training”
COMPANY: Make Real Ltd
