| How to learn empathy from an avatar |
| | Good morning,
Recently, my co-worker found herself face-to-face with her employee Linda. With agitation in her voice, Linda started complaining about a colleague who she said wasn’t pulling his weight. Soon, she became defensive. It was an emotionally challenging situation.
My colleague had to work pretty hard to remember that Linda wasn’t real.
What if virtual-reality avatars could teach humans empathy--in the real world, not in the realms of gaming or science fiction? In some workplaces, that's already happening. The Linda demo comes courtesy of Mursion, a San Francisco-based company that offers VR-based training to help employees improve their people skills. By interacting with avatars in realistic simulations, managers can learn to give constructive feedback, salespeople can polish their negotiating skills, and call-center agents can practice calming down angry customers--without endangering any real-life relationships or deals. "I guarantee our avatars know how to push your buttons," Mursion CEO Mark Atkinson tells Inc.
Mursion is just one of a growing number of companies developing VR learning and development programs for empathy, adaptability, resilience, and other hard-to-teach "soft" skills. They all say their training is faster and more cost-efficient at scale, though it's still too expensive for all but the largest employers.
In time, that could change. Read our story to learn how the growing industry could be the future of workplace learning, and what it might take to get there. |
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