How Gamification Training Helps Employees and Businesses
For many employees, uninspiring content is a major barrier to learning. With game-based learning, games become a part of your learning process. Gamification training can make a difference and provide you with a more rewarding learning experience.
This article will discuss gamification in employee training. We will show that gamified learning experiences can boost employee experiences across the entire employee lifecycle spectrum. We will also touch on some gamification examples in training.
What is Gamification Training?
Gamification refers to applying game design principles to non-game situations in order to produce specific outcomes. You can find a more in-depth explanation of what is gamification, as well as what are game design principles in our article “Onboarding Gamification.”
Keeping this definition in mind, gamification training refers to applying game design principles to a training scenario to produce specific outcomes. In this context, the outcomes refer to a more engaging learning experience.
When onboarding, new employee training is a crucial component of a well-thought out process. Employee training is essential for a well performing workforce. A sophisticated human capital (also achieved through training) helps business organisations achieve positive business results: productivity, profit, and business growth.
Gamified Training Insights
Good training allows workers to fill in any gaps in knowledge and skills. If, on the other hand, training proves inefficient, employees will not only feel frustrated with the outcomes, but they will have also lost valuable time from productive work.
Gamification training is a particularly useful strategy when handling tasks that are not enjoyable to the users. For example, an in-depth safety training programme, or compliance training might not be the most engaging topics for new hires. Similarly, non technical workers could benefit from gamification in cyber security training.
2 Stages of Gamification in Training and Development
Gamification techniques can be present throughout an employee’s entire lifecycle. After all, training and development are issues employees deeply care about. And, although there is a stage of your lifecycle called “Development and Training,” this does not mean that you cannot participate in development initiatives even at the beginning of your new employment.
This also applies to gamification techniques. We are highly confident that gamification of training and development can improve your experiences across all employee stages. So let’s take a few examples. Since we already devoted an entire article to onboarding gamification, we are going to focus on other stages of our employee lifecycle with an organisation.
1. Reboarding Stage
Reboarding refers to helping employees re-integrate in a workplace after a period of absence. This means that employees coming from leaves or absence and even employees that worked in the past will need some support integrating again.
Gamification in training and development can help companies retrain you during your reboarding.
You can learn about product updates, or new product offerings. Additionally, you can gain new skills to remain competitive in your role. This is particularly valid in cases where groundbreaking updates happened in your absence. For example, a new software that changes your workflow. Another example will be to participate in gamified cyber security training, as cyber attacks are becoming more sophisticated.
2. Crossboarding Stage
When you decide to pursue a different career path in the same organisation, you will probably participate in a crossboarding process. This may entail going through training and development. Again, gamification can facilitate your goals.
For example, you might need retraining if you are moving to a completely different department and/ or role. Let’s say you have been working as a technical consultant and decided to advance your career in sales. Your company can offer a sales training gamification offer to make your transition smoother and more engaging. There might also be new compliance modules that you have to complete. You can learn in a fun way about new software or technology.
All of these are examples of leveraging gamification in training and development during your crossboarding stage.
3 Key Improvements for Gamification in Corporate Training
Let’s explore how gamification in corporate training can help achieve essential objectives in 3 key areas.
1. Onboarding New Hires
First and foremost, when onboarding new staff, gamification in training can ensure a less boring and document dependent training. Even training videos might not engage you as a new hire. However, with gamification in corporate training, you are poised to become more engaged.
2. Training Results
When it comes to training results, both companies and individual employees reap the benefits of gamification in corporate training. For you, gamified training is more fun, making you more likely to actually remember the information you are being taught.
For companies, high quality training results translate in a positive return on investment. But this does not only refer to job productivity, but also employee engagement.
3. From Routine & Boring to Engagement
All employees have to go through safety, compliance and legal procedures. For new employees, all of this will be at the very beginning of their onboarding journey. For fully integrated employees, they will need a periodical review.
Needless to say, compliance and safety procedures are topics that are not particularly exciting. Yet, you do have to go through this kind of training with a certain regularity. But, what if rather than reading some slides, you would have a game-like experience? All of a sudden something routine and boring can be fun and engaging.
Engagement is a marker for job satisfaction, which leads to talent retention. Engaged employees, or even better inspired employees have an enormous impact on business outcomes.
Bain & Co’s Time, Talent, Energy publication makes a compelling case for why every CEO and senior leader should focus on managing human capital to beat the competition. The book showcases that The higher the percentage of engaged and inspired employees in your organisation’s workforce, the higher its productive power.
Gamified Training Insights
Employees say gamification makes them feel more productive (89%) and happier (88%) at work.
— TalentLMS, Gamification at Work Survey.
Gamified Learning: Cisco’s Implementation
There are multiple examples of companies using gamification for training. In this article we are tackling the case of Cisco.
Cisco is one of the companies that implement gamification training in various of their key programmes. One of them is their Social Media Training Programme. Some game specific elements infused in the programme are: rewards, badges, certifications, milestones and interactions.
Cisco’s gamified learning programme aligns with a key business objective: increasing internal social brand advocates. The badges and certifications that one achieves as part of the training are visible both to coworkers and management. “Who wouldn’t want to be recognized by their management?” This is what Leslie Lau, Sr. Manager of Global Social Media at Cisco highlights.
The Social Media Training Programme includes three levels of certification. They are: Specialist, Strategist, and Master. Players (employees in training) acquire these certifications by displaying a specific level of social media expertise. The specialist level is achievable after completing 15 courses. For the strategist level, 13 additional courses need completion. Finally, in order to achieve the master level, the employees have to complete the final 10 courses, in addition to creating a case study. There are two options for the case study: an integrated social media initiative, or creating a social media strategy.
Other than gaining certificates, players can also compete in challenges. Players can choose to join the challenge in small teams, or as an entire organisation.
At the initial reporting of implementing the gamified training programme for social media, Cisco reported some key statistics. “Over 650 individuals have been certified with more than 13,000 courses taken. And, this number continues to grow every day.”
Gamified Training: Concluding Remarks
To conclude, gamified training seems like a worthy investment for business organisations and employees alike. But this does not mean that any implementation of a gamified training will be a guaranteed success.
On the contrary, if the employees do not care about participating in the games (or gamified training), it can be counterproductive. Employees might feel manipulated to participate in activities with limited or no value to them. This can obviously produce many negative consequences.
This means that strategic decision making and designing are must-haves for successful corporate gamification training initiatives. However, what it does seem certain is that gamification works when it helps people achieve the goals they want and need to achieve, by making the process of achieving the goals more exciting.
Gamified Training Insights
An employee who is satisfied with his/ her work is 40% more productive than an unsatisfied one. But an engaged employee is 44% more productive than a satisfied worker.
— Bain & Company, Time,Talent, Energy.
introdus, employee onboarding software, keeps up with the latest trends and insights in HR. Our final goal is providing all new hires with the best experiences when starting new jobs. As such, our platform offers gamified training to engage you and help you learn in a fun and pressure free manner.
If you are interested in reading more about training employees, we have developed various resources with different focal points. You can read for example about the cost of training a new employee, as well as best practices for training new employees. Additionally, we have an article exclusively discussing new manager training.
Gamified Training Insights
Gamification works when it helps people achieve the goals they want and need to achieve, by making the process of achieving the goals more exciting.