Using Virtual Reality to Combat Sexual Harassment with Morgan Mercer

Workhuman Radio

How can you take your employee training to the next level? Morgan Mercer is the founder and CEO of Vantage Point, the next frontier in immersive enterprise training. They use virtual reality to bring situations to life and create truly meaningful and impactful training around topics that matter.

How it works

The biggest downfall of existing training is that it’s impossible to truly convey feelings through a 2D video or a coaching session. The biggest thing about virtual reality is that it’s experiential. When you put on the headset, you’re immersed in another environment.

You can form relationships with the characters and truly feel what it’s like to have that elephant in the room where somebody says something uncomfortable and tie those feelings directly to your actions. What did you do? What will you do?

The program is also able to leverage things commonly seen in the gaming community, like positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement, as well as user agency where the environment and story unfold based on the actions you take. It’s a more true-to-life way to learn. You can step into somebody else's shoes, see what they see, and experience in real-time how your actions affect your environment.

The program’s origins

Morgan shares how she made a joke that inadvertently hurt someone close to her. It was the first time she had been called out and it caused her to think:

Why would I say this and hurt somebody that I care about, knowingly or unknowingly?How do I form my opinions, and how does that play out and manifest itself in the way I treat other people?

And she realized that it’s not that problems like sexual harassment and gender-based violence and racism don’t exist — it’s that we need to have personal experience with the problem to want to learn about it. And creating that relationship with the problem is what virtual reality can do.

Find out more

Vantage Point is deployed right now across the United States and in Europe. If you’re curious, go to their website at www.tryvantagepoint.com and submit a request for a demo.

Resources

Morgan Mercer (LinkedIn) Vantage Point