How bad is the state of mental health right now?

The 2022 COVID-19 Practitioner Impact Survey found that demand for anxiety and depression treatment remained high and demand for treatment for trauma- and stressor-related disorders and substance use disorders has increased. These issues are made worse by the fact that mental health practitioners can’t keep up with demand. 

Here are a few concerning stats from the survey:

• 60% of practitioners reported that they no longer have openings for new patients
• 46% of practitioners are unable to meet the demand for treatment
• 72% of practitioners have longer waitlists than before the pandemic
• 79% of psychologists saw an increase in the number of patients with anxiety disorders since the beginning of the pandemic
• 66% of psychologists saw an increase in demand for treatment for depression
• 47% of psychologists saw an increase in demand for substance use treatment
• 64% of psychologists saw an increase in demand for trauma treatment
• 66% of psychologists saw an increase in the symptom severity

If companies continue to ignore the mental health needs of employees, they will see productivity and employee retention go down. And as the global economy heads into a possible recession, this could equate to major problems for the ability of companies to weather 2023 successfully.

How can VR help the mental health crisis?

Virtual reality (VR) has become widely accepted in entertainment for video games and unique experiences. During this growth, innovative companies have started using VR for employee training on everything from hard skills to close the labor gap or soft skills to improve communication and inclusion. The unanimous feedback is that VR is a fantastic medium for employees to learn and practice skills that is engaging and well accepted by employees. Which is why it makes sense that companies are now looking to VR to help with employee wellness.

Employee mindfulness content can be made available for VR headsets at company locations and even sent wirelessly to employees to use in their own headsets at home. Here are some of the fantastic wellness courses that are already available for companies to provide to employees:

• The Breathing Space – This content teaches employees breathing techniques they can use during their normal workday to reduce stress and bring them into focus. The content can also be used at any time to guide the employee through breathing exercises.
• The Meditation Space – This content teaches and guides employees through meditation exercises. There are many selections available for employees to choose the scenery and guide that help them relax. The content covers teaching meditation as well as real-time practice for employees to take a break that recharges them.
• The Wisdom Space – This content helps employees set goals and take a journey of self-improvement. Topics covered include: dealing with fatigue, asking for help, and how to keep learning. Employees can enter the virtual reflection training as often as desired to self-reflect and learn within their chosen areas of self-improvement.

While some companies have started offering mental health days to try to rejuvenate employees, there is nothing more powerful than giving employees the skills to manage stress in the moment of each work day. Additionally, giving them the tools to work on their own mindfulness and self improvement is a clear signal that a company cares about their well being.

How does VR mindfulness content help individual employees?

Practicing mindfulness has a direct positive impact on an individual employee. Here are just some of the ways that VR courses on mindfulness can help make a difference for employees.

• Increase positive interactions – Mindfulness practices, such as breathing exercises, are associated with decreased gray-matter density in the amygdala, the region of the brain that initiates a response to stress. This reduces an employee’s inclination to react defensively when challenged or when uncertain. 
  
• Improve material retention – It is a well proven fact that the more relaxed people are, the better they listen and retain information. Mindfulness exercises are a quick way for stressed employees to relax themselves so they improve productivity.
  
• Raise focus and clarity – Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon observed, “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Employees operate in a world filled with noise. Maintaining a strong focus in digital information overload is an essential skill for today’s employee. The regular practice of mindfulness routines can reduce mental wandering and distraction.
  
• Encourage continual learning – Continuous learning is a trait of a high-performing employee. This isn’t inherent in all employees, but it can be taught. A common self reflection pathway in VR mindfulness content is to learn how to keep learning. This directly relates to improved job performance.
  
• Reduce frustration – In an environment of remote or hybrid work, many employees can feel isolated and uncomfortable asking for help. Mindfulness training can provide best practices for asking others for help—which significantly reduces frustration.

Does a focus on employee wellness impact the bottom line?

Employee wellness is an important factor for cost savings that can also improve revenue with higher levels of productivity. Here are some of the clear benefits of VR mindfulness content.

• Less sick days – Many sick days are from fatigue and stress. One of the most common self-improvement paths chosen by employees in VR mindfulness content is getting help to deal with fatigue. With tips and mindful practices, employees can learn how to feel more refreshed and need less time off from work to recover from burnout.
  
• Improved productivity – A study in Cognition proved that micro-breaks boost productivity as they prepare the mind to move from one task to another. Mindfulness  exercises are a micro-break that are easy to fit into the work day. This means more and higher quality work gets done every day.
• Improve employee retention – When employees are protected from burnout and feel their
  
  employer is caring for their well being, they are more likely to stay. This is particularly important as the skilled labor gap and Great Resignation continue to wreak havoc on corporations.
  
• Improve culture – Improving culture is a goal of leadership that can be hard to set objectives and metrics for. Yet, there can be a big payoff for making changes. When employees trust and respect one another, communicate well, and work together to achieve their goals, great things can happen. Investing in soft skills and mindfulness training can absolutely create an energized culture of high performance.

If you are an HR leader looking to improve employee wellness, retention, productivity, and overall corporate culture, VR mindfulness training is a simple tool that can help achieve these goals. To get started, review the guide on how VR saves money to make a case for investing in VR. Additionally, there is a step-by-step guide for learning and development leaders on the best way to bring VR content into existing training programs.

Download the whitepaper: 5 Ways VR Training Helps Companies Even in an Economic Downturn’:

How costly of a problem is the Great Resignation?

When an employee resigns, the cost of hiring and training a new employee is 10-30% of that employee’s salary according to the Center for American Progress. That number gets bigger when considering the productivity gap left when the position is unfilled plus the toll on peer employees who may get burned out or frustrated by the extra work.

To really put numbers to this problem, a company can conservatively use 25% of salary to calculate all of the costs involved with employee resignation. Then consider the total cost of employee salaries and multiply that by 20% to represent the number of employees who have or may be leaving the company during the Great Resignation. Then take 25% of that number to get the total cost.

If a company has $500M in annual revenue, they likely spend around 20% of that on employee compensation, or $100M. Using the equation above, the Great Resignation conservatively equates to a $5M annual cost for that company.

How can VR help with employee retention?

A Gallup study of high-performing workplaces showed that companies that make a strategic investment in employee development are twice as likely to retain their people, while also increasing profitability by 11%. But the same old training content and methods isn’t going to help companies retain employees. A clear investment in their development needs to be demonstrated and VR is a fantastic tool for that.

It’s a given that employees will be trained on the hard skills they need to do their jobs and VR can help with that. But companies need to go beyond this to training content that can truly improve the workplace, employee relationships, and demonstrate that the company cares about their well being.

HR and learning and development leaders should look into the VR content that is already available in these high impact areas:

• Workplace safety – Even the simplest safety courses like learning how to perform CPR or use a fire extinguisher can show employees you are invested in their well being. And doing it in VR is incredibly effective, yet low cost as VR can easily simulate emergency scenarios.
  
• Leadership skills – Making sure managers are doing a great job helps to make sure all employees feel good about the workplace culture and development.
  
• Communication skills – Improving employee communication helps the business and shows employees the company is investing in their personal development. At a time when many companies are struggling with remote work, this is a critical offering to invest in to keep productivity high and avoid quiet quitting scenarios.
  
• Inclusion and diversity training – Despite numerous lawsuits, not many companies are forced via regulations to offer this. That said, making an effort to improve in this area is a positive investment in culture. And it can help a company avoid the cost of a lawsuit should a serious problem arise.
  
• Employee wellness – Beyond training, VR can be used to help employees meditate, reduce stress and work on self improvement. All of this improves focus and productivity. And ultimately employee retention.

Can corporate training really be fun and engaging?

It can with VR. Virtual reality adds a level of fun and gamification to training that is highly engaging for all ages. This is especially true for a younger workforce that has shorter attention spans and  is highly resistant to learning via traditional methods. Learning by doing is the most successful approach and VR is the best medium to make this happen.

Want more evidence for leadership on the cost cutting benefits of VR training? Read whitepaper here.
Want more details on how to bring VR into your training program? Get the step-by-step guide here.

Download the whitepaper: 5 Ways VR Training Helps Companies Even in an Economic Downturn’:

Companies are feeling the pain of ‘redos’

The training programs that are being applied to teach hard skills to unskilled labor lack immersion and the ability to practice the skill. This was adequate for skilled labor that just needed to be able to apply their existing skills to a new process or piece of equipment. But for employees that don’t have experience, this isn’t enough.

General Dynamics felt the pain of this problem. They build ships and over time the company saw mistakes in the field that had to be redone climb to a seven figure cost per ship. When they analyzed the issue, they realized that ineffective training was to blame. 

Similarly, Chick-fil-A experienced difficult onboarding new employees using traditional methods. They were providing written manuals to young adults who weren’t reading or engaging with the material. This resulted in bagging mistakes which was costing them customers and reducing the lifetime value of a customer. In other words, they noticed the mistakes were costing them revenue.

Redos aren’t the only problem with traditional training. Companies like General Dynamics and Chick-fil-A have also seen increases in on the job accidents.  All the more reason why these companies are turning to VR training to better engage employees and improve skills training retention to reduce redos and keep employees safe.

How VR can be used to upskill workers and reduce mistakes

Onboarding and upskilling workers with virtual reality has been proven to be faster and more effective than video and classroom learning methods. Universities have been performing research studies for years validating this fact. The University of Maryland found an 8.8% average increase in memory recall with VR. Iowa State University used VR to help train welding students and 100% of the students who used VR training performed better on weld testing than students who used traditional training methods.

A study done by Accenture on VR training reinforces these findings that it is a superior learning method for learning hard skills. Accenture tested two groups on learning how to replace a toilet. One group used VR and one video learning. When the training was completed, the learners were asked to assemble and install a toilet in real life. The VR learners demonstrated on average 12 percent higher accuracy and 17 percent faster time to completion than instructional video participants.

These results have been further cemented by real-life use of VR training. For instance, Homegrown restaurants use VR training in onboarding and realized a 27% increase in the success of employee onboarding. That means new employees stuck with the program and went on to work in the restaurants. United Rentals also uses VR training for onboarding and experienced a 50% reduction in the time to train employees with VR.

Bottom line—VR training programs can help employees learn the skills needed faster, and will do the job better. This saves companies money by improving productivity and reducing expensive mistakes.

VR training is a must-have for companies training unskilled labor

Adding VR content to onboarding and skilled labor training is now a critical change for companies to make in order to manage costs and stay competitive. Virtual reality cost-effectively allows employees to practice skills in life-like environments. There is a large library of existing VR training for hard skills and it is easier than most L&D leaders think to add in custom elements. 

If you are a learning and development leader interested in learning more, here is a great paper with additional evidence on the benefits and ROI of VR training. And here is a guide on the steps to add VR into your current training program. The right training can help reduce the skilled labor gap and save big money. And that is a big win for L&D programs—especially as things get tight in a questionable economy.

Ready to talk with VR training content experts on getting the right training for your skilled labor needs? Talk to an expert here!

Download the whitepaper: 5 Ways VR Training Helps Companies Even in an Economic Downturn’:

What are the unnecessary costs of training?

There are high costs for training that attempts to create a real-world experience for trainees.  This may involve traveling to a real-world location or to a special training center. It may also involve sending equipment to the trainees or shutting down production equipment for training purposes. Some companies may have a handle on these costs, but there are many others, like employee productivity, that they may not be calculating. Many companies don’t tally up these costs because they seem to be just a cost of doing business. With virtual reality, all of these costs can be eliminated or significantly reduced. And that is an interesting opportunity for learning and development leaders that may be feeling the budget squeeze of a tough economy.

To calculate training costs accurately, include the following:

• Travel – Add up the travel costs of instructors and trainees for trips to training facilities or to work locations.
  
• Equipment – Determine the cost of lost production if major equipment is shut down for training.
  
• Shipping – If equipment is being shipped to work locations for employee training, consider the
  shipping costs, cost for people / time to manage this process, and the cost of writing off that equipment.
  
• Facility – Some companies have invested in a specific facility for training and should add in all the overhead costs of that facility.
  
• Productivity – Training takes time from instructors and employees. Calculate the time lost from travel and/or the length of time to train difficult concepts with traditional training methods. While VR training won’t eliminate training time, it does significantly reduce the time it takes employees to learn hard and soft skills.

There are also costs associated with traditional training that are being incurred more frequently due to the skilled labor gap. Companies are attempting to train unskilled new employees with traditional training methods that aren’t getting the desired results. This is causing mistakes that are adding up for businesses.

To calculate costs from the ineffectiveness of traditional training include:

Incorporating VR technology that engages employees and radically improves skill retention into existing employee learning and development programs can make a major impact on an organization. VR learning is a smart investment for companies dealing with the challenges of an economic downturn or to help fuel growth when the economy is good.

• Accidents – Employee safety is important for employee satisfaction, but also for the bottom line. Safety incidents create loss in productivity, which can also burden peers with too much work. There is also a hard cost for disability and OSHA or other fines. 
  
• Re-training – Mistakes happen and this often triggers re-training. If the frequency for training employees has increased (which is common during the skilled labor gap) then it is important to add the additional training time costs.
  
• Re-work – When mistakes happen in the workplace because someone is doing something incorrectly, this can cost companies time and money. This is especially true for skilled labor. If work has to be redone because of insufficient or poor training, these costs need to be included.
  
• Lost revenue – Negative customer interactions or poorly made products can have a big impact on revenue with customer loss or lowered lifetime value of a customer.

The skilled labor gap combined with budget cuts to corporate training can have a big impact on the bottom line. Training leaders have an opportunity to make a case to supplement their training programs with virtual reality in order to cut training costs as well as corporate loss from mistakes.

Here’s the math on a grocery chain’s productivity costs for training

• A large grocery chain has 1,300 stores and around 200,000 employees
• They send each corporate employee to stores to see what a store looks like. Both the trainees and store employees have to take time off of work to walk through a store. 
• If it took 8 hours on average at an average $17/hour salary this is costing them over $27M. 
• This calculation does not include travel costs.
• Depending on employee turnover rates, this cost is likely realized every 2-3 years.

How VR training eliminates these costs

VR training is excellent for creating life-like scenarios for employees to interact with equipment and conditions that feel very real. This can include scenarios where certain equipment or training facilities were needed—which means those costs, including travel, can be eliminated. Productivity losses can also be significantly reduced by eliminating travel, but also because VR training has been found to be faster than traditional training methods. An Accenture skilled labor VR training study resulted in a 12% higher accuracy and 17% faster time to completion versus instructional video. Furthermore, a Pwc study on using VR training for soft skills found VR learners can be trained 4x faster than using classroom training.

VR training does have costs associated, but they are minimal compared to the savings. VR headsets and content are the main costs. Content can be loaded wirelessly onto VR headsets across the globe so no shipping is required, just purchase. For training on specialized equipment, custom content is needed, but this is often much less expensive than anticipated as existing content can be modified for specific equipment instead of starting from scratch. In fact, there are entire libraries of VR training content that exist for corporate use from safety training to hard and soft skills training. 

For the costs a company suffers due to ineffective training methods, there have been lots of research studies done comparing virtual reality training with other training methods. The studies look at things like learning retention, time needed to learn, effectiveness in learning a skill (hard or soft), and costs. The bottom line is that virtual reality is extremely effective on all counts. [See all the statistics on VR training effectiveness here.] And that means less safety accidents, less mistakes and rework, and improved customer satisfaction.

Need help calculating your actual training costs?

PIXO VR has worked with many large organizations to help them figure out the true cost of their existing training programs. If you’d like a free training cost analysis, you can fill out this form to get started.

Want more evidence for leadership on the cost cutting benefits of VR training? Read whitepaper here!

In our previous whitepaper we covered how to bring VR into your training program, get the step-by-step guide here!

Download the whitepaper: 5 Ways VR Training Helps Companies Even in an Economic Downturn’:

Why training budgets should be protected

When financial pressures hit organizations, the first round of budget cuts is often internal-focused in areas like HR and learning and development. Hiring freezes leave positions unfilled. Headcount reductions add to the burden on existing employees, causing them to become overworked, stressed, and unappreciated. In an era where many employees can easily leave to find new work, this is a dangerous situation for companies to be faced with.

The Aspen Institute recognizes this trend, “In far too many organizations in which economic downturns trigger budget cuts, learning and development funding is among the first to go. While it’s easy to understand why reduced revenues necessitate heightened cost-consciousness, halting investment in upskilling is a strategic misstep that deprives organizations of key opportunities they could exploit during a recession.”

Companies need to reconsider traditional notions of what budget cuts cause the least short term pain and instead consider which areas should be continued or even see higher investment to prepare the company to successfully get through an economic decline. A Gallup study of high-performing workplaces showed that companies that make a strategic investment in employee development are twice as likely to retain their people, while also increasing profitability by 11%.

Will investing in training really make a difference during a poor economy?

The answer is yes. Investing in learning and development can actually reduce costs, yielding those budget reductions the company may need to weather difficult economic conditions. The Aspen Institute commented that companies that invest in learning and development during an economic downturn “are taking a conscious step to remain among those most able to communicate a strong employer brand and compete for top talent during times when wages and other benefits are likely to remain stagnant.”

That sounds great, but companies need P&L bottom line improvements and those can be found, but not with traditional training. If a company has been stuck training the same way they’ve been doing it for years, this is a hard concept to get behind — classroom style with a teacher and a detached student. Even if a company has moved to video and online learning, the concept is still the same. Employees are expected to absorb material and regurgitate it back.

This isn’t how people truly learn.

You can’t give a 17 year old a 20-page pdf and expect them to read and learn concepts any more than you can expect that a senior manager can master harassment discussions or that a new employee can learn a technical skill without practice. Even job shadowing still assumes a person can learn by seeing, not by doing.

True learning comes from practicing a skill in the environment they need to use it.

This type of immersive learning comes from virtual reality (VR).

What cost reductions can be seen with VR training?

Incorporating VR technology that engages employees and radically improves skill retention into existing employee learning and development programs can make a major impact on an organization. VR learning is a smart investment for companies dealing with the challenges of an economic downturn or to help fuel growth when the economy is good.

Here are five key benefits companies can realize by investing in VR training:

1. Reducing the costs of training – There are many training needs that require a special environment or specific equipment to train. This often incurs high costs for instructor and/or employee travel, shipping special equipment, shutting down production equipment, or the cost of recreating a real-life scenario. VR training eliminates the need for all of these costs with the ability to create life-like simulations that provide employees with hands-on experience without the added cost.
   
2. Improving employee safety – Keeping employees safe is great for employee happiness, but definitely impacts bottom line costs. Reducing workplace accidents keeps employees on the job and productive. It also reduces OSHA fines and disability costs. All of this adds up to higher production and less expense.
   
3. Overcoming the skilled labor gap – A lack of skilled labor is a big problem across many industries that will only be made worse with hiring freezes and budget cuts. Hiring unskilled labor and trying to train them using traditional methods is resulting in mistakes that have big costs to fix. VR training is faster and more effective at training hard skills than traditional training methods. Bringing VR content into employee training can reduce the skills gap and keep mistakes low.
   
4. Keeping employees engaged and retained – When the hiring freezes hit, valuable employees can get burned out. Next comes ‘quiet quitting’ or an actual exodus. Losing employees is a costly proposition of around 30% of the employee’s salary to find a replacement, let alone the cost of lost productivity and additional burden on others. To keep from losing these employees, companies need to continue to invest in their development. VR can play a big role here with hard and soft skills training that can improve employee engagement as well as make employees feel valued. 
   
5. Improving employee culture and job satisfaction – Going hand in hand with retention is keeping the employee culture strong during difficult times. This goes beyond skills training to looking for ways to improve diversity, inclusion, and employee wellness. There is a wealth of VR content for helping employees embrace these difficult topics, as well as reduce stress with guided meditation and wellness exercises. The same headsets used for skills training can be extended for employee development that keeps employees smiling amongst the challenges they face day-to-day. This increases productivity and keeps the company performing at the high levels needed to persist through the down economy.

Companies need to look to learning and development as a key function to weather the storm or even help a company thrive despite economic conditions. VR training can bring positive change and bottom line cost savings for companies looking for a strategic win in any economy. 

Wondering how to get started with VR training?

For learning and development leaders looking to help their company’s thrive, VR training is the answer. VR content naturally compliments existing training content to provide employees with ways to apply and practice skills needed to be successful. 

Want more evidence for leadership on the cost cutting benefits of VR training? Read whitepaper here!

In our previous whitepaper we covered how to bring VR into your training program, get the step-by-step guide here!

Download the whitepaper: 5 Ways VR Training Helps Companies Even in an Economic Downturn’:

In these post-pandemic times we are experiencing a paradigm shift: at work, at home, and in work-from-home environments. Our old practices, habits, and beliefs no longer serve us or are relevant to our changing landscape. This can be a very challenging and stressful time for companies and individuals.

Successful organizations have long recognized the need for what is termed “corporate wellness”. Empathetic leaders look for ways to keep their teams relaxed and focused, free from stress and anxiety. This greater emphasis on well-being and mental health delivers more resilient, creative, and collaborative employees.

Although sharing a cup of coffee or chatting over the water tank can seem relaxing, research posits that a microbreak can refresh the mind and refocus us better than these activities. A microbreak is a complete break where we step out of our normal concerns. This can come in the form of a walk in the park, a breathing exercise, or a meditation.

Finding a place to take a microbreak isn’t always easy, especially for those in highly populated metropolitan areas, or stuck inside all day. This is where virtual reality comes into its own.

Solas VR’s Virtual Reality Wellness App transports the user to beautiful nature-based scenes to allow five to 10 minutes to experience the joy of sitting under a tree, or by a lake, or simply in beautiful sunshine surrounded by spring flowers.

The Solas VR experiences allow users to reconnect to nature and recenter thoughts and emotions. We continually stimulate our sympathetic nervous system – fight or flight. Spending time in nature, even virtually, stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system to balance this, inducing feelings of calm, centeredness, and control. This leaves users with reduced stress and better resources to deal with the next activity. This new clarity of the mind can help individuals manage stress and burnout, and corporations to build strong, highly effective teams.

Users do not have to train in meditation, mindfulness or even breathing techniques as the app takes them on a journey leveraging the power of virtual reality to deliver these nature-based transformational experiences. Absolute beginners can master breathing techniques, or immerse themselves in a beautiful lakeside scene listening to the guided meditations.

Virtual Reality has already been adopted by large enterprises across various industries as a powerful new training tool. Instead of spending hours trying to explain hard skills, soft skills, or wellness as new corporate needs, VR technology creates an environment identical to the real one.

Simply put, Solas VR wellness experiences complement training activities. We know that students who are calmer and less anxious are more open to new learnings and ideas. When trainees are in a calm state of mind they can absorb knowledge faster, making training exercises less time consuming and more effective. Solas VR experiences can enhance training benefits as well as the user experience, contributing to less anxious or stressed employees

In a nutshell, virtual reality applications, like Solas VR in particular, reframe training and teamwork and introduce new methods to replace traditional ones. Either before a meeting, as a focusing practice, or as a training environment itself, VR changes the rules of the game and allows employees to stay calm and focused in an unprecedented way.

Click here to find out more about meditation + mindfulness in the workplace and the modules we offer on PIXO Apex

PIXO Has Improved VR Management to One Easy Step

As VR training becomes more prevalent in enterprise, one of the leading issues users have identified is how complicated managing the training seems. With PIXO, VR management has been simplified to just one easy step.

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