Immersive Learning
Now Is The Time To Invest In Your People
How Immersive Learning can help you come out of the pandemic stronger.
During this period of huge adaptation and uncertainty, the one area where businesses have to keep on investing is in the people who make them great.
With a recession looming that may be the biggest we see in our lifetimes, it is fair to say that we can expect to see businesses making cutbacks across multiple areas. It is highly likely that learning and development budgets will be viewed by some CFO’s as luxuries and not necessities during the financial hardship that many organisations will face in the near future.
Whilst businesses may struggle and changes will need to be made, slashing funding that leads to the restricting of employee development would be a huge mistake to make.
Remote working has been something that a huge portion of society have had to get accustomed to over the last few months, with the UK Office for National Statistics reporting that 46.6% of people in employment worked from home at some point during the month of April. A switch to a more remote way of working seems inevitable and a recent Gartner survey found that almost 3 out of 4 CFO’s plan on moving at least 5% of their office-based workforce to permanently remote positions after COVID-19.
We have already seen organisations such as Twitter announcing that their employees can work from home permanently should they choose to and Facebook similarly expects up to half of their employees to become permanently remote. Whilst that helps keep overheads down, the impact it may cause to employee development could be hugely damaging.
What does this shift mean for the world of work as we know it?
No more informal chats by the coffee machine? No spontaneous games of ping pong to break up the day? No more passing colleagues and friends in the corridors?
Not only does working at an office provide greater life stability and a separation between life and work, it allows for collaboration between employees and departments which leads to more engagement, recognition and an overall sense of job satisfaction. All of which are factors which contribute towards a positive business output.
For most, this is all completely new, so it’s hard to judge what impact remote work will have on individual development and it will be a while until we start to see the effects that it may have on business performance.
But surely it’s going to do more harm than good? Most of us work with exceptional colleagues and not having those people around to bounce ideas off or guide us with key decisions can only put a halt on the development of employees. This, when potentially coupled with a reduction in people’s access to learning opportunities due to budget cuts, will only lead to a stalling in individuals growth and be completely counterproductive with the drive forward that businesses need right now to ensure that they have a competitive edge in the future.
How can businesses overcome a pandemic and a global recession?
Well, there is never going to be an easy answer to that but we are confident that now IS the time to be investing in the people who will be with you through it all. At a time when people’s confidence is at an all time low, what better way for businesses to restore faith amongst their staff than by investing in them.
Showing that you are committed to developing and nurturing talent, will in turn increase confidence in the organisation, improve employee engagement and boost rates of retention, all desirable benefits for any business.
Immersive Learning as a solution
This is where techniques such as Immersive Learning can provide a solution. An immersive approach to learning can help to focus on those core competencies that are already often overlooked and have the potential to be completely neglected should training budgets be slashed as a means of money-saving.
Immersive Learning (def.)
“the use of immersive techniques, including storytelling, theatrical performance, technology and puzzles to develop and exercise skills”
Immersive Learning works because it empowers the participants to come up with solutions that they wouldn’t otherwise dream of. It facilitates creativity and innovation when it comes to problem-solving and works by mirroring the real-world, except it doesn’t have the real-world consequences. It’s a safe space to be creative, innovate and explore.
What benefits can you expect to see?
Immersive learning can be applied through quality narrative and storytelling, where participants really engage in the activity. Characters can be used to add motivation, creating a stimulating scenario or problem to challenge them. Then by removing all constraints, creativity can freely flow. Sometimes the solutions will be completely crazy but often that is exactly what is needed when dealing with a real-world problem.
Creativity is not the only skill that is exercised, there’s an extensive variety of skills that can be developed using immersive learning techniques:
- Setting goals
- Risk-taking
- Problem-solving
- Understanding roles and responsibilities
- Timely decision making
- Management reporting
- Conflict resolution
- Negotiation
- Leadership
- Relationship building
- Effective communication
All these skills are highly valuable in any modern workplace but are sadly often overlooked by traditional training approaches despite their ability to contribute to real, tangible, long-term business benefits.
Benefits which include increased engagement with future learning activities, improved creative solutions to business problems and increased adaptability and innovation when faced with new problems.
In conclusion, the world as we know it is changing. Remote work may become the new normal, however, businesses will need to continue to develop the staff they have and Immersive Learning is the answer to how this should be done.
The idea of doubling-down on the learning and development of employees during a pandemic may not seem like the most logical step to take. However, the rewards that will come from businesses implementing a strategy now where there is a clear plan for the approach they want to take moving forwards, will prove invaluable in the months and years to come.
Mathew Rainbow is passionate about the designing, building and delivering of Immersive Learning experiences for skills development, as part of the team at chronyko. For more information about Immersive Learning, head over to the Immersive Learning publication.
