Workplace & Enterprise
Leadership development, diversity and inclusion training, and organisational change programs designed to foster growth and cultural transformation. This is PTR's largest body of published work: VR training built with global technology, transport, aviation and telecommunications organisations to help leaders and teams recognise bias and practise inclusive behaviour.
Classroom-style diversity training has a weak, sometimes negative, track record in peer-reviewed research. Embodied VR perspective-taking works through a different mechanism, one peer-reviewed study found it changes real decisions where passive formats did not, and PTR's own Google case study is independently peer-reviewed. None of that proves the effect lasts beyond the training session.
Work in this sector
Google: VR DEI training
At Google, a VR DEI training built with Equal Reality - the studio whose DEI training line PTR now carries forward - ran four scenarios, each experienced from two perspectives. The work was documented in a peer-reviewed paper presented at CHI 2024, co-authored by Google researchers and PTR co-founder Leonie Sanderson. The first training cohort of Google security team staff reported 94% satisfaction, and all but one rated it better than Google's standard DEI training.
Metro Trains: gender equity
With Grit Leadership, PTR delivered VR training using the Everyday Inclusion module to Metro Trains head office and operational leaders, surfacing systemic bias affecting the recruitment and retention of women in traditionally male-dominated operational roles such as train maintenance, and prompting leaders to see facility design and resourcing decisions through a new lens.
Etihad Airways: cabin crew inclusion
With Utano Global, PTR ran a two-day VR training pilot for 36 Etihad Airways cabin crew, using the Everyday Inclusion and Mind Shift modules to tackle cultural misunderstandings, hierarchy-driven communication breakdowns and unconscious bias. One participant said: "It looked real, as if I was really there."
Optus: Included @Optus
PTR also built Included @Optus, an experience developed to support a culture of belonging, letting users step into the shoes of both employees and managers to see the impact of workplace bias in real time.
Why VR, and what this evidence does not show
Traditional, classroom-style diversity training has a documented credibility problem: peer-reviewed research by Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev has found that mandatory diversity training frequently produces no improvement, and sometimes a decline, in workplace diversity outcomes. This is part of why PTR builds experiential, embodied training rather than a lecture format.
Online perspective-taking did not shift gender bias in a simulated hiring exercise. PLOS ONE, 2022
The same study found embodied VR perspective-taking produced a significant change in participants' hiring choices. PLOS ONE, 2022
That is a meaningfully different result from classroom training, but it is not proof that PTR's own case studies above have lasting effects. None of the four projects on this page measured behaviour weeks or months after training, and the wider VR perspective-taking literature has found some bias-reduction effects fade within days. The Google case study is the exception with independent peer review, and even that measured satisfaction and a same-day comparison against Google's standard training, not long-term behaviour change.
Five situations from the practice library
The feedback conversation, the upset customer, the concern raised for the first time, the deadline that does not fit, and being talked over. These are rendered illustrations of the scenario patterns, not footage from a client build.
What clients say
Sources and further reading
Our approach to immersive training · The PTR VR Library · Who we've worked with · All industries