Revolutionizing Implicit Bias Training Through VR

Most companies require employees to undergo DEI training at some point in employment. One of the crucial elements of DEI training is Implicit Bias. Implicit biases are a result of unconscious decisions based on our previous experiences and can often be confused with expertise knowledge arising from previous experiences. How do you change an unconscious behavior in a person by making them aware of it without hurting their feelings? How many people are willing to recognize their biases and make an effort to rectify them? Most companies understand the value of implementing training for their employees. These pieces of training are offered to improve the work environment, build stronger and more effective teams, improve communication, harbor a safe and better workplace culture, and boost productivity.

Implicit bias training requires a deep level of training that is critical to employees for professional growth. Most of us are unaware of our own biases and how it affects our behavior in the workplace.  It requires training methods that challenge people’s thought processes and self-image creating scope for improvement. Currently, the market implements an educative approach toward Implicit bias training. They include seminars making people aware of different types of biases that exist in the workplace, and active participation of employees by recreating real-time scenarios among other practices.

The effectiveness of this training is majorly based upon conclusions received through surveys of employees undergoing this training. Other factors include complaints and litigations, employee retention, and partly employee productivity. The underbelly of this form of analysis is how much can one rely on employees sincerely responding in surveys. Do employees actually take time to consciously recognize their biases and the problems stemming from the bias or do they respond with what they think would be the right way to respond? Could it be possible that people facing issues within the organization are experiencing so because of their own biases rather than others?

At Virtual Apprentice, after several hours of research, discussions, and collaboration with end users, trainers, Leadership, and organizations such as Harvard we have designed a training application in Virtual reality that we believe will help people recognize their biases unconsciously. The product – Harmony VR is a result of several interviews to understand the pain points for end users, trainers, and organizations. One of the most common responses we received from end users across different sectors was the current training methods are repetitive and can tend to make employees lose interest easily.  Leadership teams were concerned with the risk of employees taking offense when made conscious of their biases while organizations were concerned with being able to receive a quantifiable analysis of the training, especially with respect to litigations and employee retention.

Taking into consideration the result of our team research and interview Harmony VR is designed and developed to give Implicit bias training a more practical approach than theoretical approach with quantifiable results for companies to measure the impact of the training on employees. HarmonyVR is an immersive implicit bias workplace training software for Diversity or HR Management professionals that enhances user engagement and learning.

Harmony VR gamifies training to give employees a more engaging and interactive platform. Since the application is played within a VR headset it discards other sources of distraction and helps employees focus on their decision-making skills. The application places users in real-time team-building situations with varying tasks to be conducted through the game. They are then required to rate characters/colleagues for different characteristics as they shortlist team members to be a part of their team. Players undergo several rounds of judgment and interaction to finalize their team. 

In conclusion, the player is informed if the characters/colleagues were the correct choices or the wrong choice for the task. The players are scored for the selection, the amount of time they observe characters and traits before making a decision on how confident they are with the choices. As employees focus on the game and score their decisions will be the effect of their unconscious bias. We strongly believe the game will encourage employees to push themselves to receive higher scores by improving their decision-making skills. Each game will be a different task iteration and include a different set of characters. As they progress through different gameplays the changing game score will help employees recognize their unconscious biases during their decision-making.

With a lot of privacy and accountability concerns within the organization, the application is developed to provide organizations with a cumulative report of the scores received by the staff engaged in the sessions. The leadership team can thus receive quantitative results of their team’s performance without compromising the identity of a particular employee and permitting employees to not be conscious of being judged when undergoing the session. The application is also designed to be customized to different market sectors to make it more relatable to users. For example, the application could be designed to have users be in a hospital for those in the medical industry, a school/college environment for those in the education sector, or an office sector for corporate employees. We also have the capability to design the tasks performed in the application to be directly related to the organization’s requirements.

We are excited to introduce HarmonyVR as a game changer to implicit bias training and look forward to working with people across different sectors to help improve the workplace for all. We are currently piloting our demo product to receive feedback to help us build a much stronger application. If you or your team is interested to learn more about Harmony VR or would like to demo our product, feel free to getting touch with us through email at info@virtualapprentice.net. We look forward to hearing from you.