KFC and Walmart Are Using VR to Train Employees. Here's Why Your Company Should Too VR isn't just fun and games, as demonstrated by the growing number of companies using it effectively for employee training programs.

Both virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technology are commonly thought of as consumer technology that empowers entertainment-driven pursuits — primarily games like Pokémon Go.

However, VR is also being adopted more often for employee training. One increasingly common use is in fire safety training. VR is a safe way to demonstrate to workers how fire spreads and behaves in specific spaces and atmospheric conditions. This ability to visualize how a fire develops helps improve safety and response time by eliminating minutes that are often lost to shock and panic when confronting a dangerous fire.

Here are four reasons why VR can help improve your employee training and safety programs.

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1. VR makes training more attractive to employees and consequently increases interest

Let's face it: VR can make most things a bit more fun. Whether it's just the novelty of the experience or a combination of tech appeal and the involvement of all the participant's senses, virtual reality is highly attractive.

Imagine yourself faced with a single, stark choice for mandatory training: An hour-long in-person lecture with printed materials and a slide presentation, or the same amount of information conveyed in a VR context. Which would you choose?

Most people would like to experience the VR option. The appeal of VR helps create more interest in the information that's being transmitted. Virtual environments improve employee responses and willingness to participate in the training itself, by increasing the immediacy of the training scenario.

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2. VR helps employees understand and retain training concepts

When I think back to traditional training sessions and workshops I've participated in, I'm struck by what I don't remember. That's true for most people. The problem is often one of engagement. When we're just not that interested in the material or its delivery, it's less likely we'll retain that information for later use.

This failure of retention is a big problem in any kind of employee training, because if your workers don't remember and utilize what they've learned, was the investment in training worth the cost?

With VR environments, however, training becomes the equivalent of a full-body experience. By involving sensory input beyond simply reading or listening to a lecture, VR-based training raises the level of focus and engagement. This multi sensory involvement helps employees understand and retain the information that's being transmitted in a more efficient way.

Related: Virtual Reality Is Already Changing How We Work and Communicate

3. VR may help people understand the immediate and secondary impacts of decisions

In one study conducted by researchers from the University of Georgia and the Oak Ridge Associated Universities in Tennessee, people who were reluctant to get a flu shot were shown three outcomes of a failure to vaccinate using VR technology. Those outcomes included how the disease spread, what happened to vulnerable populations (the young and the elderly) who were infected and how the vaccine protects both the vaccinated person and those around them.

The study's authors concluded that using VR to help educate people who were "vaccine-avoidant" could help these people see and experience the potential consequences of their decisions. In turn, this should help the study subjects make better decisions in the future.

The same logic holds true for employee safety training. By showing your employees all the consequences that flow from a failure to adhere to a specific safety protocol, for example, VR can more immediately drive home to those workers why the protocols must be followed. A well-designed VR program should appeal to the worker's sense of self-preservation and of personal responsibility to others.

Related: We Used Virtual Reality as a Training Tool. Here's What We Learned

4. You can use VR in a variety of real-world training contexts

Real-world examples demonstrate the broad variety of fields and industries that are successfully implementing VR-based training for their employees or planning to in the near future.

For example, rather than dump new hires into a busy fast-food kitchen during a lunch rush, Kentucky Fried Chicken plans to help them learn the ropes through the use of a VR-based game in which they must cook chicken according to KFC rules.

Walmart's VR program uses Oculus Rift headsets to walk trainees through a variety of common in-store experiences, where they'll make specific decisions about how to respond to these scenarios based on the input they observe in the VR environment.

Finally, BP trains its oil refinery workers at one facility using VR to demonstrate start-up and emergency exit safety procedures. In the oil refinery environment, there's just no real-world equivalent of "hands-on" training for emergencies, apart from being thrust in the middle of one. VR helps fill that gap by safely showing workers what happens in dramatic events.

Related: Criticism of Facebook rains after launching advertising in virtual reality video game

Explore VR as a training solution for your business

If you're intrigued by the concept and think VR might be able to help your employees learn and retain more of the critical job and safety training they need, start by researching real-world examples of how it's being implemented in your field or profession.

Depending on your company's specific needs and budget, there are a number of VR platforms and technological solutions available, with various approaches and price points. Make sure you review independent reviews of each option before you commit to working with one.

An effective transition to VR also requires careful consideration of the information that needs to be transmitted, which portion of that data can be successfully ported into a VR environment, and which remaining information should be taught using more traditional methods. Then you can develop a useful script for the VR scenarios.