Lloyds Banking Group – Relationship Management

Challenge

Increase complexity of Virtual Reality interpersonal soft skills training scenarios across multiple departments and training use cases.

Use Case

Following on from the successfully deployed “Difficult Conversations” and “Personal Vitality + Resilience” VR learning experiences within LBG, this project set out to provide greater depth of interactions and create meaningful outcomes for learners with measurable impact and improved  assessments.

Hardware

As a result of evaluation of VR training hardware options with the previous deployments, Lloyds Banking Group decided to focus on Oculus Go (3DoF) and Oculus Quest (6DoF) VR headsets only for this and subsequent training applications, as part of a desire to remain tether-free by supporting standalone devices only.

Build

Utilising further refinements to the scrip-to-screen VoiceOver and motion capture engine, Dialogic, that Make Real has created for interpersonal soft skills immersive learning experiences, Relationship Management increased the complexity of dialogue, scenarios and learner outcomes to 1,500 lines of scripted dialogue with multiple narrative outcomes.

The immersive learning experience to provide training in VR covers 4 areas:

• Stakeholder Relationships
• Temperament & Rapport
• Negotiation Skills
• Relationship Management

Impact

Lloyds Banking Group has rolled out Relationship Management across their six main UK training centres with 200 VR headsets (mix of Oculus Go and Quest business editions) to reach their 175,000 employees. The VR training experience has been incorporated into five of their existing interpersonal skills (soft skills) training courses as part of a blended approach.

• Building Stakeholder Relationships
• Temperament & Interaction Style
• Life is a Negotiation
• Retail Accelerated Development
• Commercial Accelerated Development

As per the design, learners are expected to run through the training, be assessed, have group discussions around their performance and learnings, then replay the training experience to enable pre/post-training improvement tracking.

Each learning centre has been setup with a VR learning space with dedicated hardware area that includes charging station and Cleanbox hygiene station, plus additional hygiene wipes, replacement facial interfaces and masks, alongside the cleaning and operation guides.

LBG have reported back to us that this is their first training course offered also available as an optional self-study unit that has high demand for access, now with a waiting list of employees looking to undertake the training.

Training impact assessment is ongoing however some of the benefits of using VR for immersive learning experiences for interpersonal soft skills training includes:

• Reduced time to train – Learning objectives can be delivered in shorter sessions anywhere
• Reduced costs to train – Learners do not need access to real world assets or travel for training
• Improved training scenarios – Edge cases and greater depth of interaction and involvement
• Repeatable – Virtual simulations can be easily replayed and repeated or customised
• Consistent – Many forms of traditional training suffer from consistency of training where humans are involved to provide the same level of quality repeatedly

The VR training application has been nominated in the AIXR VRAwards 2020 for the “VR for Training and Education” category.

The VR training application has also been nominated in the LPI The Learning Awards 2021 for the “Best External Learning Solution” category.