Case Study: Creating Positive Behavioral Outcomes with IKEA
This case study conducted by IKEA U.S. assessed the ability to create positive behavioral outcomes when using a set of Vantage Point’s virtual reality training experiences to train employees across 62 US locations.
A 2022 case study on VR for immersive training suggests immersive training could be an effective tool to help teach prosocial behaviors to participants. Vantage Point’s experiences are a first step toward allowing participants to develop empathy by stepping into an experience from varying perspectives (first-person, bystander, fly-on-the-wall) that they could never otherwise embody and build awareness while forming embedded memory leading to behavioral change. While we don’t pretend that our experiences can ever fully encompass the array of life experiences of the identities of the characters that trainees take on, our programs have been validated as an opportunity to expose participants to different perspectives that develop even deeper empathy, self-awareness, and that teach crucial business skills.
VR engages the same cognitive parts of your brain and encodes memory the same way as real-life experiences. State dependency is an important factor in what makes VR for training so effective. State dependency means that a behavior is learned better if your internal mental state is similar during practice and testing. In cases where organizations have adopted VR training, companies have successfully achieved outcomes such as reducing employees’ training time from 10 hours to 30 minutes (resulting in months of returned productivity).
Vantage Point focuses not just on returning hours of employee productivity but also on driving toward impactful skills-based learner outcomes that affect an organization. These skills relay themselves both internally within a company’s culture and externally facing, driving towards business outcomes (with all skills taught transferring not only internally to how colleagues treat one another and how hiring decisions are made, but also being directly applicable to companies that navigate dealing with prospective and new clients, customer service support calls, vendor relationships, addressing a global audience, navigating intersectionality in an evolving workplace and more).
Can Virtual Reality be used to train new behaviors and critical soft skills for an increasingly interconnected and global workforce?
This case study took place within IKEA U.S. wherein participants were trained across over 62 locations. Using Vantage Point’s proprietary analytics system, we assessed behaviors participants displayed in the training program to evaluate if we could leverage embodiment and programmatically make recommendations and give in-experience feedback that would lead to more positive behavioral outcomes. At the end of each training session, participants engaged in a facilitated debrief discussion. During the debrief discussion, participants were asked to dive deeper into their perspectives, choices, and learnings. This was facilitated by Vantage Point certified facilitators and is designed to create a group-oriented learning experience after a fully-immersive VR-based individual learning experience. After completing the facilitated session and training, participant’s behaviors, actions, and scores were anonymously aggregated without PII and were analyzed to assess skills such as:
- Self-awareness,
- Empathy,
- Role-specific behavioral change,
- Confidence,
- Hesitancy,
- and more.
When comparing participants across various locations, we were able to identify that some locations were able to strengthen their core competency, topic comprehension, and skills gaps throughout the duration of training around important topics related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). Participants were then asked in facilitated sessions about how these new perspectives and learnings uniquely applied to their day-to-day functions within IKEA.
The results of this case study show that VR training can both create a safe space for participants to practice embodying new perspectives and practicing behaviors and can also translate these learnings into an environment where participants are able to apply them to their day-to-day lives. While more research is needed, these preliminary results provide strong evidence that VR is an effective form of training.
