Leadership Training
Virtual Reality Training
Strengthen Soft skills in VR
Upgrading leadership skills with VR
As a leader, you face difficult decisions and conversations every day. To prepare future leaders, Finansforbundet uses immersive VR to train some of the most stressful situations in a calm and controlled environment.
Why: VR build confidence to handle difficult situations
As a leader, you are expected to keep calm in every situation. Even in tough situations that you have never experienced before.
You have taken a course, read the textbook, and reflected on how you would behave in a certain situation. But there is just no way of knowing how you actually play it out until you are in that situation, your heart is pumping, and eight other urgent things are craving for your attention.
Training is the best you can do to let the mind and the body fall back to familiar routines. Training the most difficult conversations, like firing someone, can only be done in a roleplay. Roleplays on a leadership course takes time, not everyone get to try, and it is hard to maintain a level of realism and seriousness.
For these reasons, Finansforbundet is introducing two modules of leadership training in VR in their course for future leaders.
When you put on the VR headset, you get immersed. Your mind believes the setting is real, your body reacts physically to the environment and the emotions, you do not get easily distracted by your surroundings, and you can train the situation over and over until you reach a level of confidence.
About Finansforbundet
Finansforbundet is the Financial Services Union in Denmark. It provides advice on well-being at work, career, and employment rights to their 59,000 members, as well as offering a large number of courses and events.
What: Two modules that prepare you for tough conversations
Finansforbundet and Virsabi developed two modules for this experience. One where you get feedback from an employee, and one where you have to let three different people go.
These two topics were carefully selected based on the instructors’ experience and feedback from leaders about what topics are difficult to handle.
In both modules, a person talks to you, and you then select different replies by pointing at them with your finger or the controller. Your answer determines the next action from the person on the other side of the table.
Finansforbundet deliberately chose to develop a manuscript for different determined conversational paths rather than build the experience around an AI chatbot based on a Large Language Model. A choice based on educational experience where these fixed paths open for follow-up conversations about how your personality type responds to other people profiles in different settings.
How: Build on partnerships
This is not the first time Finansforbundet develops VR training of difficult conversations. Read how they use it to train union representatives here: https://virsabi.com/finansforbundet/
They already have the know-how about how to manage multiple users in headsets in a classroom setting at the same time.
The shared values between Virsabi and Finansforbundet made the cooperation a delight. Defining the topics of the modules was done in common workshops, singling out the most important topics and brainstorming on the how VR can support the learnings best.
UI and sound designers from Virsabi cater to every detail, until the office environment in the VR experience could easily be mistaken for the office setting for a member of Finansforbundet. Personas are chosen in cooperation, and voice actors complete the experience and makes it all realistic.
Handling the large manuscripts for the different paths of the experiences was done in collaboration with our sister company, Mulmio, and Finansforbundet was closely involved in getting all the details and the wording right to match the curriculum of their leadership course.
In other words, this experience was made in a close partnership between Finansforbundet and Virsabi, and we cannot highlight how much we enjoyed the process.