1375: Live In Their World - Changing Workplace Culture With VR

The Tech Talks Daily Podcast

Live in Their World is helping companies and organizations use VR technology to tackle workplace cultural issues and help employees develop and practice new skills for a respectful engagement at work. Today, VR is an immersive technology that many HR executives are starting to embrace to train employees on workplace issues from racism to sexism to hidden systemic biases.

Especially in the wake of new Black Lives Matter protests, Live in Their World (LITW) hopes to use Virtual reality to help people better understand others by putting them in their colleagues' shoes, allowing organizations to use the technology to help create a more diverse and more inclusive work environment.

By immersing employees in realistic digital environments, virtual reality can lead to mind-bending experiences, such as making users feel as if they have swapped bodies with someone else, letting them see first hand what it's like to be discriminated against or treated in an uncivil way.

According to Harvard Business Journal, Incivility costs an estimated $14,000 per employee per year through sharp declines in employee performance and effort and lost time. Managers spend a total of seven weeks each year on average of addressing employee conflicts and their effects, not counting increased turnover or legal costs.

Even more specifically, nearly a third of adults in the US, UK, France, and Germany have experienced or witnessed racism in the workplace, according to research from Glassdoor, making it even harder to retain staff from ethnic minorities.

Robin Rosenberg, Ph.D., CEO and Founder of Live in Their World and shares with me how the company uses virtual reality to address issues of bias and incivility in the workplace and upskill employees for respectful engagement.

She is a clinical psychologist, and prior to starting her company, she had both psychotherapy and coaching practices, wrote college textbooks, and taught psychology classes at Lesley University and Harvard University. Robin combined her interest in immersive technologies with her coaching and clinical experiences to foster in employees a deeper understanding of how and why other people may feel slighted or marginalized and how to approach such interactions differently.

She's also been interested in virtual reality (VR) for years and was the lead author of a study to investigate using "VR for good." She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Clinical Psychology and Assistant Clinical Professor at the University of California, San Francisco.