Chris McCarthy, the director of safety at Bond Civil & Utility, thought the internet was going to be a “phase.” So he was hesitant when his boss, Anthony Bond, told him about a new training program that would use virtual reality to train the company's construction workers.
The program is only in its infancy, but McCarthy is ready to admit that maybe his boss was right.
The Medford-based construction company teamed up with Pixaera, a London-based VR company, to bring safety training into a new dimension.
Bond Brothers Inc. uses VR headsets to train its employees in various safety scenarios. Pixaera specializes in workplace-safety training for construction workers and provides the headsets' software.
The software has 13 modules for workers, each taking nine to 15 minutes to complete. The modules range from confined-space training to line-of-fire drills. The VR training supplements current training practices and keeps employees up to date on the latest safety precautions needed in different work environments.
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Each headset costs between $400 and $600, and the software is in the ballpark of $50,000 for 700 sessions, according to McCarthy.
“We were anticipating people not being comfortable with this and not wanting to put the headsets on,” said McCarthy. “It didn't end up happening. We did have 100% buy-in, and not a single person not willing to give it a try.”
Because the training is short, Bond can cycle many of its employees through it at once. According to McCarthy, in the spring, Bond was able to cycle 400 employees through the training over four to five days.
Construction workers can spend years doing the same job or working the same site, simultaneously making it a second home and increasing the potential of injury, according to Heather Jameson, safety manager at Bond Brothers.
The new VR systems are a reminder that things can still go wrong on familiar job sites and how to handle the situations that arise. The headsets also provide a safe environment to see how bad a situation can get.
“Even as people fail in this game, you could also learn from the failure, which is good because it'll explain what you did wrong,” Jameson said. “Even as people fail and don't get the best scores, they're still walking out of this with good insight on what should have happened.”
The program is still in its infancy, having only started three months ago, but Bond Brothers is already starting to see some positive effects.
According to McCarthy and Jameson, VR training increases retention in worksite practices when supplemented with traditional training methods.
“It's great to see the excitement that they have after this versus them almost falling asleep walking out of the classroom because we sat there two hours with the PowerPoint,” Jameson said.
