Novità
- How can virtual reality make corporate onboarding more engaging compared to traditional methods?
VR eliminates the “brochure effect” of traditional onboarding — that moment when a new hire is handed piles of documents that inevitably end up forgotten in a drawer. But it goes further: it turns the newcomer from a tourist passively visiting the organisation into a citizen who actively inhabits the company. And it does so while removing the pressure of making mistakes from the equation.
No longer do you just listen to someone explaining how the office printer works: you actually try to print, experience the paper jam, and solve the problem. It’s the difference between watching MasterChef and actually cooking; only by cooking do you build the muscle memory you’ll need when it really matters. Most importantly, VR creates a “bubble effect”: once you put on the headset, the outside world disappears. No WhatsApp notifications, no ringing phone, no colleague walking by to distract you. You are 100% present.
- What advantages does VR offer in helping employees understand corporate culture and core values?
Company values look wonderful in theory but are much harder to apply when a client is shouting or a project is running late. VR transforms values from abstract principles into lived simulations: instead of memorising that you are “customer-centric”, you find yourself in the shoes of a customer who has been waiting three days for a reply.
Even more powerfully, VR allows you to step into someone else’s role, a role-play that enables you to experience multiple perspectives of the same situation. You might be the manager giving tough feedback, then the employee receiving it, and finally the customer affected by its consequences. In this way, you experience the causes and effects of organisational behaviour. When you live through a scenario — even virtually — values stop being slogans and become tools for better social understanding.
- How can VR improve safety and knowledge retention for new employees?
VR lets you experience situations directly. You can feel what happens if a fire alarm is ignored, if safety shoes are not worn, or if a company password is shared — and you can even “die” virtually without real-life consequences. Our primal brain doesn’t fully distinguish between real and simulated danger: the adrenaline released when seeing the consequences of an error in VR creates a deep memory trace.
It’s the same principle that makes us remember exactly where we were on 11 September, but not where we left our keys last night: strong emotions, even artificial ones, embed memories more profoundly. And all of this happens in a safe, protected environment, with the guarantee of a right to fail. You can make mistakes, retry, and make them again until a behaviour becomes automatic. In real life, this luxury would be far too costly.
- What added value does VR bring in fostering empathy and a sense of belonging for newcomers?
Traditional onboarding often reduces people to an org chart: “This is Marco from Sales, this is Sara from Administration.” Names and functions are easily forgotten when not tied to stories or memorable traits. VR, on the other hand, lets you experience their typical working days: you see Marco handling a client threatening to switch supplier, or Sara fixing an accounting mess in 20 minutes while juggling three urgent calls.
You’re no longer meeting job descriptions, but real people with their daily challenges, small victories, and stressful moments. This creates lasting memories and empathy. When you later meet the real Marco, he won’t be just “the sales guy” but “the kind, competent person I saw brilliantly managing a crisis.” It’s the difference between reading a description of someone and having shared a meaningful experience with them.
- How can VR support a more inclusive, accessible, and scalable onboarding process?
VR helps solve a common problem: while everyone preaches equal opportunities, the head-office employee often has frequent, direct access to the CEO, whereas the colleague in a provincial branch only sees them briefly on a video call. With VR, whether you’re at headquarters or in a remote office, you can access the same quality of experience.
Even more significantly, VR allows you to experience the company quite literally through someone else’s eyes. You can attend a meeting from the perspective of a colleague with hearing difficulties, navigate the office with mobility restrictions, or work on a project from the standpoint of a different cultural background. This isn’t inclusivity preached but inclusivity practised. Instead of being told to respect diversity, you live diversity — and that fosters deeper empathy and sensitivity, rooted in the most human of processes: identification.
