For the past ten years, CBS has aired a show called Undercover Boss, which follows a fairly strict formula. A corporate bigwig disguises themselves as a frontline employee and goes “undercover” to work in a restaurant, factory, or retail location. Almost inevitably, they meet a minimum wage worker with a heart of gold and a sob story, promise to make changes at the top to benefit the workers, and deliver money to pay for cancer surgery or college tuition or rent. There are also usually remarks about how hard it is to flip burgers or stock shelves or deal with irate customers.
The show is...problematic, for sure. But it also hints at a broad labor trend -- oftentimes, those at the top have never done the actual work that frontline staff do every day. And while dropping an exec unnoticed in an outlet is tricky to pull off, there is an easier way to let bosses understand what their workers deal with every day -- virtual reality.
I was reminded of this when another speaker at a panel I did told a story about putting a manager through a training made for frontline workers. The manager took several tries to get through a relatively straightforward task, and afterwards told the speaker that it gave her a new sense of empathy for just how hard the work was. She said that she often felt impatient while waiting for tasks to be completed, but now understood just how complicated some of them were.
There are absolutely ways to screw this up. Several years ago, KFC took a swing at VR and missed in a big way, creating a piece that was a mashup of an escape room and training sim for cooking fried chicken. The goofy, winky tone helped no one, and the piece disappeared quickly, which was a shame. A more straightforward training piece that included some gamified elements could have been great for both worker training and showing bosses how hard the day to day work actually was.
Ideally, creating this type of training for frontline workers and then also using it to educate bosses would lead to some sort of systemic changes around wages and working conditions. But even if it doesn’t go that far, a boss who understands the skill it takes to do these tasks would have some sort of greater empathy for the workers who power their businesses.