Making Employee Onboarding an Immersive Experience with Mixed Reality

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Mixed Reality is a phrase used to describe technologies like Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. Science fiction foresaw the use of an alternate reality and immersive technologies well before humankind actually developed such advanced technologies. The 80s saw the release of a movie titled ‘Tron’. A software engineer gets pulled into the world of a powerful mainframe computer and interacts with different programs within the system and seeks to escape the digital world in which he is trapped. It sounds all too far-fetched and improbable. The movie brought in lots of fascinating perspectives about computer programming, virtual worlds, games, and role-play in computer games to the public.

Making Employee Onboarding an Immersive Experience with Mixed Reality

Returning to the subject of this blog post, mixed reality is an integral part of the gaming and software industry. With significant progress in the fields of animation and 3D effects, VR headsets are now used in different industries to train people to do their jobs better. From training medical students and helping them become efficient surgeons to training mechanical engineers working in factories; VR is well and truly a game-changing innovation.

The Value of 360° Employee Onboarding

Employee onboarding is an integral part of an organization’s work culture. Every fresher or seasoned professional joining an organization needs to experience a full-fledged onboarding program to understand how the organization functions. In the rush to get work done quickly or deploy staff on projects at the earliest, onboarding programs are being reduced to one-day induction programs with different department heads rattling away prepared lines. This serves no real purpose other than just some filtered information being transmitted. True onboarding programs work best when employees understand what the organization expects out of them and the organization empowers them with the information they need to know to do their work better.

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This is where 360° Employee Onboarding comes into play. Be it form-filling and documentation, assigning work-stations, ID-cards, insight on company policy and regulations, to the nitty-gritties of organizational hierarchy and how teams function; the ideal employee onboarding process should leave no stone unturned to empower employees. As organizations evolve and embrace the developments in technology; it is time to examine the use of mixed reality in employee onboarding as well. Products like the HTC Vive Pro and the Oculus Rift offer a powerful and engaging mixed reality experience. Google has invested a fair bit of money and effort into creating Daydream its Virtual Reality platform and associated devices to experience VR with ease. Not to be left behind, Apple is also pumping in serious money in to its ARKit project. The use of mixed reality solutions for onboarding, enterprise learning, and training may still be in its infancy; as tech-companies like Xiaomi come up with inexpensive VR-devices; expect the tide to change.

Toyota High System a division of Toyota Industries used InstaVR to create a 360 degree Interactive VR Office Tour for its campus recruitment project. This was a smash-hit at the campuses that Toyota visited for its recruitment fairs and generated a fair bit of interest among students to just experience the interactive office tour. This is just one effective way of using mixed reality for enterprise needs and we are sure the next few years will see a significant growth in the use of AR and VR for employee onboarding.

Microsoft Pulls Up a Surprise

Earlier this week Microsoft pulled up a surprise with an announcement regarding SharePoint. Last overhauled a couple of years ago SharePoint powers intranets and internal communication tools of over 400,000 organizations globally. In its latest avatar – ‘SharePoint spaces’ it is a simple yet powerful tool that can be used to create immersive, mixed reality experiences. Just look at the significance of this product update when you consider the number of organizations already using SharePoint. Our bet is that this will be a significant move by Satya Nadella and team and this is going to well and truly revolutionize employee onboarding and learning.

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What are your thoughts on mixed reality solutions being used for employee onboarding? Are you looking for an employee training solution that’s powered by AR or VR? Look no further. Write to us at info@originlearning.com and we will help create an immersive mixed reality learning solution for you.


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