A new study finds that empathy might be the soft skill with the biggest impact on business results.   New Catalyst research suggests that empathy can be a powerful antidote to stress and contribute to positive experiences for both individuals and teams.

• Innovation.  People were able to be more innovative under empathetic leadership.  61% of employees reported being more likely to report being innovative compared to only 13% of those with less than empathetic bosses.
• Engagement. 76% of people with empathetic leaders said they were engaged with work tasks vs. only 32% of those with leaders that were less empathetic.
• Retention, Inclusivity and Work-Life balance were all areas of performance that were measured and that had significant improvements with those reporting more empathetic leadership.

Finding successful strategies to keep a workforce engaged and happy has never been more important in a waning workforce.  Keeping employees has long been proven to cost less than hiring and re-training new hires.  Effectively training all levels of management on better ways to empathize with their teams is a priority.

Biglook360 has become the leader in the VR Training space, creating ground-breaking hard skill training and soft skill training for Fortune 1000 companies over the last two decades.  Recently, the company was engaged by a major health care company to create an immersive VR training program specifically focused on empathy training for its managers.

The goal of this pilot program was to allow managers to become fully immersed in the emotion and stress experienced by an employee. Using proprietary techniques at multiple locations and in studio, 360-degree video was used to capture real-world footage from the likes of an employee’s home office as well as scenarios around a corporate campus. This gives Managers the ability to experience first-hand what it is like to deal with seemingly normal stressors that an employee may feel throughout a typical day but with the added stresses of an employee with struggles in their personal life.

Immersive VR training scenarios like this provide up to 4x the efficacy in retention compared to traditional video and computer based training and up to twice the efficacy of classroom training.  “Because the training is delivered in a totally immersive environment and is free of any other distraction, users get a true first-person perspective of what it is like in an employee’s world that is experiencing a mental or physical challenge.  They can connect at a much deeper level than traditional or other conventional types of training,” said Lance Loesberg, CEO of Biglook360.   He added, “Empathy training requires the learner to really understand at an emotional level and VR accelerates that process by totally immersing the user into the environment. “

VR empathy training is just another example of how VR Training is growing in the enterprise.  For more information on how Biglook360 can help your organization use VR for training employees more effectively, contact us by clicking below or emailing contact@biglook360.com