How Enterprises Can Improve Business Efficiency with VR Training

Key Points

• Strong ROI and cost efficiency at scale – VR training reduces training time, operational costs, and reaches cost parity or better than traditional methods with larger teams.
• Faster learning and higher retention – Immersive experiences accelerate time-to-productivity and significantly improve long-term knowledge retention.
• Scalable and consistent training delivery – VR enables instant, standardized training across multiple locations without instructor or logistics constraints.
• Improved safety and employee performance – Risk-free simulations lower accident rates while boosting confidence, task accuracy, and overall performance.
• Versatile business impact beyond training – VR supports collaboration, product development, and customer engagement, driving efficiency across the enterprise.

Enterprise efficiency isn’t just about optimizing processes; it’s about empowering your workforce to perform at its highest level while minimizing costs, errors, and risks. Virtual Reality training delivers quantifiable returns across every key performance metric: reduced training time, superior knowledge retention, lower operational costs, enhanced safety, and accelerated time-to-productivity.

The ROI Case

Studies consistently demonstrate that VR training delivers superior ROI compared to traditional methods when deployed at enterprise scale. According to PwC research, VR training achieves cost parity with classroom instruction at 375 learners, matches e-learning costs at 1,950 learners, and delivers greater cost-effectiveness at 3,000 or more employees.

Walmart deployed VR training across 4,700 locations, reaching 50,000 employees, reducing training time by 96%, from 8 hours to 15 minutes for specific modules. This resulted in millions of dollars in productivity savings, while improving employee satisfaction by 30% and post-training assessment scores by 12.5%. UPS achieved a 75% reduction in training time (from 8 hours to 2 hours) through VR driver simulations, resulting in fewer accidents and improved performance.

Efficiency Gain: Training Time Reduction

VR training compresses learning timelines compared to traditional methods, enabling employees to achieve full productivity more quickly. This acceleration occurs because immersive learning engages multiple senses simultaneously, creating stronger neural pathways. Boeing reduced assembly technician training time by 75%. VR eliminates logistical overhead (travel, scheduling, facility costs) and increases focus. VR trainees are 4 times more focused than e-learning participants.

Efficiency Gain: Knowledge Retention

Employees typically forget 90% of the material they have traditionally learned within a month. VR training inverts this equation; employees retain a large majority of the knowledge they acquire even after a year. This improvement eliminates costly retraining cycles and reduces errors caused by forgotten procedures.

Indiana’s Department of Child Services implemented VR for emotionally charged scenarios, resulting in a 31% increase in employee retention and saving over $72 million annually.

PwC research further validates this: VR learners were 275% more confident applying skills after training compared to classroom learners. This confidence translates to better real-world performance with reduced supervisory requirements.

Efficiency Gain: Scalability

One of the most powerful efficiency advantages of VR training is its ability to deliver consistent, high-quality training across unlimited locations simultaneously, without incurring additional instructor costs. Traditional training faces inherent scalability challenges; instructor availability, facility capacity, and geographic dispersion all limit how rapidly organizations can train large workforces.

VR eliminates these constraints. Once modules are developed, they deploy instantly to thousands of employees globally. Every trainee receives identical instruction, ensuring standardization of procedures, compliance with regulations, and consistent skill development regardless of location. When regulations change or procedures are updated, VR modules can be modified once and instantly redistributed across the entire enterprise.

No-code platforms like Mazer Trainer amplify this advantage by enabling training teams to create and deploy new modules in days without relying on external developers.

Efficiency Gain: Safety and Risk Reduction

Organizations implementing VR safety training report reductions in workplace accidents and injuries, resulting in immediate cost savings through lower workers’ compensation claims and fewer operational disruptions. Mining operations implementing large-scale VR training recorded injury reduction. Intel’s electrical safety VR program achieved 300% ROI over five years.

VR safety training enables employees to experience realistic dangers without incurring actual risk. Workers practice emergency evacuations, hazard identification, and responding to equipment malfunctions repeatedly until their responses become automatic.

Efficiency Gain: Cost Reduction

VR training generates cost savings across virtually every dimension: reduced travel expenses, eliminated facility costs, lower instructor fees, minimized equipment wear, and decreased material consumption. Manufacturing facilities benefit from training employees on expensive machinery without having to shut down the equipment. Healthcare eliminates cadaver training needs. Hazardous materials training avoids the consumption of actual dangerous substances.

Efficiency Gain: Employee Performance

VR-trained employees demonstrate improved performance, with some completing tasks faster than their classroom-trained counterparts. Bank of America’s VR training showed significant improvements in employee confidence and customer satisfaction scores.

Getting Started

Focus on high-cost, high-risk training scenarios where VR delivers the strongest ROI. Select scalable, no-code platforms that empower your training staff. Integrate with existing systems connecting to LMS and HRMS. Measure rigorously and establish clear KPIs before deployment.

Benefits of using Virtual Reality as a communication tool in business

With VR, your employees can see each other, talk to each other, and interact with each other, without actually having to be present in the same room – at least not physically! Let’s go over some of the most prominent features and uses for VR in business and work environment.

Hold efficient board meetings

With VR, you can easily organize and hold board meetings, without actually having to ever gather your board members in a physical room. This can be especially useful if your board members are located far apart from each other and organizing a physical meeting might be difficult and expensive. In such a case, VR is much more effective at serving as a communication channel than simple communications apps – which tend not to work very well in the first place. With VR, you can actually see your coworkers in a 3D space, interact with them, and create shared projects – without the need of organizing any means of travel. Conferences, meetings, and collaboration spaces can be created effortlessly with the help of Virtual Reality.

Train your staff over long distances

Virtual Reality also proves useful when it comes to training your staff and organizing courses. Similar to how VR conferences work, you can quickly gather large amounts of staff in a meeting space without having to physically bring them all together. However, with Virtual Reality, you can quickly create simulated lifelike scenarios in an active environment, allowing your trainees to experience through practice even more than they would be able to in a physical setting. Creating a practical course with simulated scenarios in real life can be costly – very costly. Using it, you can organize professional corporate VR training at a much cheaper price. Moreover, VR sessions eliminate the risk factor which becomes a problem in some training situations. Research has also shown that using VR in corporate training increases trainee engagement and retention rates, making the training much more efficient.

Virtual Reality can be easily adapted for any industry

VR software can be used in a wide variety of scenarios. A business representative can provide virtual presentations, meeting with clients face-to-face, or train for doing so in a simulated environment, where they can be measured on aspects such as eye contact and behavior. Even the retail industry uses Virtual Reality for staff training, preparing them for scenarios such as the holiday rush. VR gives a sense of presence and scale not possible to achieve with other devices. It can be utilised when constructing buildings or accessing windmills farms optimal placement for increased productivity. Logistical scenarios can be planned beforehand or even errectic an entire production facility, without it even existing yet. However, VR can be used for much more than that. Medical professionals use Virtual Reality to simulate high-risk situations, such as surgeries, allowing them to practice in a lifelike environment without putting themselves – or anybody else – at risk. You can read more about virtual reality in medical training here. Military personnel have also been using VR for years now as part of their training, including flight simulations and battlefield simulations.

Increase your staff’s productivity with VR

What are some other benefits of VR in business? Apart from training, VR can be also used for the actual work done at your company. For example, Virtual Reality can be effectively used for interior and architectural design, providing the designer with all of the tools and space necessary to let their creative juices flow. Unlike regular 3D design software, Virtual Reality actually puts the designer in a 3D environment with which they can interact fully – and it has been shown to produce much better results! While equipping every member of your company with a VR headset of their own can be expensive, some of the newest headsets can be quickly assembled and disassembled at any place, allowing you to simply lend the headsets to your employees whenever necessary. This makes VR not only an extremely effective tool, but it is also one that is not expensive to utilize.

Attract new customers with virtual reality

When it comes to impact of virtual reality on business, it is not just a new communication channel, but also a new medium to present and create content. As such, it creates many new marketing opportunities, allowing you to reach new, previously unexplored audiences. Many companies have already started successfully implementing VR in B2C communication through virtual reality, and the results are very promising. A great example of that would be IKEA and its use of augmented reality to let customers place a virtual copy of their furniture inside their own homes using nothing more than a smartphone. This not only presents a great opportunity for the customers to see how the product looks without having to visit the shop physically, but it also lets the clients see exactly how it will look in their own setting!

Moreover, brands are increasingly leveraging VR showrooms and experiential marketing campaigns to create emotional connections with customers. For example, automotive companies host virtual test drives that allow customers to experience vehicles realistically before making purchase decisions, dramatically shortening the sales cycle.

Create new products fully in VR

We have talked about VR’s use in communication and training – but can VR actually be used to create a full product? The answer is absolutely yes! Creative workers such as designers and architects can utilize the fully 3D VR environment to create new projects, without the limitations that a 2D display brings. VR can be a factor that directly influences sales. For example, a sales representative might use VR to not only connect with potential clients, but also to demonstrate the product without bringing the clients physically to the company. A car dealer might use VR to show their potential customers a vehicle, and even let them drive it – the possibilities are truly endless!

Furthermore, VR-based collaborative design platforms are transforming product development by allowing distributed teams to work simultaneously on 3D models, accelerating feedback cycles and innovation. This seamless integration of VR into the creative workflow is expected to become a standard across industries in the near future.

Conclusion

In an increasingly competitive economy, enterprises cannot afford training approaches that waste time and fail to effectively develop competence. VR training delivers measurable improvements across various profitability dimensions, including reduced training time, superior retention, enhanced safety, and improved employee performance.

Ready to transform your enterprise’s operational efficiency? Connect with Mazer’s HR professionals to develop a customized strategy delivering measurable business results.

Sources:

“Bank of America is First in Industry to Launch Virtual Reality Training Program for Employees in Financial Centers.” Bank of America Newsroom, 20 Oct. 2021, newsroom.bankofamerica.com/content/newsroom/press-releases/2021/10/bank-of-america-is-first-in-industry-to-launch-virtual-reality-t.html.

“Boeing: Cuts 75% training time with VR, AR.” InfiVR, 16 June 2020, infivr.medium.com/-a11a38d22f0d.

“Customer Story: How UPS Saves Training Time and Labor Costs With VR.” ArborXR, 2024, arborxr.com/blog/customer-story-how-ups-saves-training-time-and-labor-costs-with-vr.

“PwC’s US VR study: The effectiveness of virtual reality soft skills training.” PwC, 2022, https://www.pwc.com.au/digitalpulse/upskilling-training-vr-metaverse.html.

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“Strivr helps Walmart reduce training time by 96% | Customer story.” Strivr, 2024, www.strivr.com/customers/walmart.

“Using Virtual Reality as an Effective Corporate Training Tool.” Dedicated Computing, 2020, info.dedicatedcomputing.com/hubfs/Intel/virtual-reality-corporate-training-solution-white-paper.pdf.

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“We Explore 22 VR Training Statistics for 2025 (Plus Trends).” ArborXR, 2024, arborxr.com/blog/vr-training-statistics.