Safety is a matter of utmost importance within companies. For an activity to be truly safe, those who work in it must be properly trained and aware of the risks and how to avoid them. For this reason, and also because it is a legal obligation, safety courses are regularly offered at various levels. However, while complete and highly professional, this approach risks not capturing the attention of the participants, who see these occasions more as an obligation than an opportunity.
That's why at Mauri we decided to try a different approach: that of Virtual Reality and, in particular, Gamification. With the expertise of Virtual Safety Lab, a company in the Como area specializing in the creation of Workplace Safety Courses using Virtual Reality, seven Mauri’s employees were able to experience this innovative mode of delivering courses: "The company is firmly committed to the path of innovation and digitization: the decision to also turn to immersive experiences is just another aspect of this important work", explains CEO Luca Mauri, a staunch supporter of the opportunities arising from a conscious and reasoned use of all the opportunities of new technologies.
"The first experience of this kind in the company took place on March 31st and was the Course on Workplace Safety for Supervisors with the help of immersive Virtual Reality," explains Giovanni Tavola, Process Engineer. "We used the training intervention of the start-up Virtual Safety Lab, which gave us the opportunity to make training simpler, more fun, and engaging for all participants." If the first point to emphasize is the greater degree of interest shown by those involved, the benefits of new technologies applied to training do not end there. "The methodology used is a new training method that allows us to simulate the teachings learned during the theoretical lesson, putting them into practice in virtual reality as if they were real, without running the risks that can arise from real situations. Not only that: we can also transform theoretical concepts into stimulating, engaging, and often even fun paths, with the great advantage of better learning and greater retention of concepts."
In this way, the use of Virtual Reality is a great step forward in the approach to training in companies. The goal, of course, is to increase the awareness of those who work there and to produce a long-term influence on the behavior of employees and their assumption of responsibility towards daily activity and the impact their actions can have. With Gamification - which is the tool used in these courses - it means the application of methods typical of the gaming world, to contexts that are not playful: we all know how engaging and totalizing games can be, not only for children. That's why the mechanisms that drive the game are so effective in conveying messages of various kinds, actively involving the user who must achieve specific goals. The typical lightness of the game thus becomes the way to reach a greater awareness in this specific case in the field of safety, but the potential and areas of application are potentially endless.