5 Most Effective Employee Engagement Activities You Can Undertake Today With AR/VR

Employee engagement is more critical than ever. Workers switch jobs almost every 2-3 years. Engaging your workforce is essential to productivity and success of every company. There are some reasons why engagement in the workplace goes wrong.

• No Interaction: Companies fail to interact correctly with their workforce. Humans become engaged more through informative interaction than presenting the information.
• Employers Not Meeting Employee Where They Engage: Most companies still have not employed mobile devices to communicate with their workforce. Every worker has a mobile phone in their pocket. Mobile phones capture the attention of workers more than slide presentations.
• Information Overload: Too much data distracts workers from essential and engaging information. As a result, employees tend to ignore email, memos, bulletins, and less-interesting announcements.

What’s the solution? Augmented and Virtual Reality are technologies that help create engaging experiences. Here are 5 AR and VR activities you can do to reach better employee engagement.

Onboarding Online Tours

Use Virtual Reality to create online onboarding tours. New hires can tour the organization before their first day on the job. Also, they can see their workstations and familiarize themselves with the facility. In like manner, they can gain experience interacting with customer personas.

This kind of welcoming enables you to present a better picture of your organization. Also, you can create an exciting and enticing onboarding process. As a result, you produce an engaging and personalized experience for your new hire.

New employees don’t stay too long with companies because they do not feel like they are part of the company. Bad onboarding experiences cause this lack of retention. Using a product like Oculus Rift for your online tour can introduce new people to the existing team. This kind of interaction creates a welcoming experience. This kind of onboarding works well to engage remote employees.

Teamwork and Collaboration Game

Today’s workplace is evolving fast due to expansions of office locations and remote talent, which is the new normal. As a result, collaboration and teamwork become a challenge. People thrive in situations where they can communicate and work together.

Keep Talking, and Nobody Explodes is a game that builds collaboration and teamwork. In this game, your chosen team must defuse a bomb. One person dons a VR headset while two to four other people receive instructions on how to deactivate the bomb. The only way they can solve this problem is to communicate and cooperate. This activity enables team members to collaborate to reach a common goal. Also, it helps your employees to work together under pressure while staying calm.

Wellness and Mindfulness

Activities that promote mental and physical wellbeing can create a fun and engaging office space. Promoting wellness and mindfulness at work goes a long way to relieving stress. Between hustling to meet project deadlines and setting up the next successful project, workplace stress can build up. Allowing your team to step back to recharge their batteries provides the needed pressure relieve. A meditation-based VR enables your workforce to untangle the knots within so that it can tackle the next project with vigor. 

Build Social Awareness and Community Involvement

Today, more companies are looking for ways to become active in their communities. These companies want to become good “corporate citizens.” Organizations that wish to support their neighbors rely on their employees to be the voices and faces of that support. Most workers welcome the opportunity to volunteer in their community; some workers seek out companies with a good track record of volunteering.

Using VR to inspire humanitarianism shows your company’s commitment to the community and social responsibility. The above example uses virtual reality to help people to understand and empathize with the Syrian refugee crisis. The power of this technology encourages your workforce to do social good in the world.

Promote Fun

As a company, there are several things you can do to instil fun in the workplace. On Friday, you can utilize half a day to do something useful, in the likes of bowling or go on a scavenger hunt. Social activities at work help coworkers bond.

Another enjoyable activity is allowing your workforce to experience a Job Simulator. Here, your employees get transported to a virtual workplace where they can do anything they want. They will have fun watching the humorous spins on day-to-day work activities.

These activities are only the beginning of what AR and VR can do to improve employee engagement. If you can think of other virtual activities, please let us know.