Significant benefits of using Virtual Reality (VR)

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A Virtual Reality (VR) Leadership Lab was launched by leadership development consultancy, The Networking Company, last week in a first for South Africa and Africa.

The company bought a licence from Jenson8, which developed the technology and is a global VR learning content specialist.

Helen Nicholson, chief excitement officer at The Networking Company, said on Friday that they had bought the exclusive rights for Africa. She had heard about it from a colleague in Dubai, where a lab was opened six months ago and thought it was a good idea.

After bedding down South Africa, Nicholson said she aimed to expand in countries that The Networking Company did business in: Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya.

She said The Networking Company would be busy in South Africa for the next six months before taking the lab to other African countries. The South African lab is based in Rosebank, Joburg, and Nicholson said that within the country they would go where clients wanted them to go.

“I see a year down the line labs in companies so, FNB for example, would have a lab. That has already happened in Dubai.”

The lab was officially launched on Wednesday last week at the SingularityU South Africa Summit 2019 and Nicholson said it was well received. She said that many chief executives and decision-makers had attended the event and they were looking for tools that would appeal to younger staff members because they felt they could get engagement much faster. The new VR multiplayer education and training tool, Team VR, is seen as the bridge between team potential and team performance.

It allows 12 to 18 people on a team. The tool is hosted in the cloud, which allows for team members’ performance to be assessed from whereever they are in Africa without being in the same place at the same time.

“Virtual reality for teams is in the early stages of entering the corporate space, moving outside the video-gaming sphere. Team VR utilises immersive learning to deliver training that is easily scalable, repeatable and free from distractions.” – said Nicholson

Nicholson said that to keep performing optimally, teams had to evolve in terms of how they collaborated, how digitally savvy they were, how innovative they were and the way that they communicated with each other.

“The different scenarios they are immersed in force team members to face the impact that they have on another and allow them to make the necessary changes to their behaviour,” – she added.

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