Employee training systems have evolved drastically in recent years. As businesses search for new ways to empower their teams in a rapidly-changing landscape, traditional educational strategies are giving way to more engaging, intuitive experiences.
With actionable gamification techniques, businesses can not only boost the outcomes of their learning initiatives, but also improve employee experience, retention, and productivity. Studies show that 83% of employees feel motivated by gamified training, while around 49% say they’re bored or disinterested during non-gamified sessions.
Here’s how you can implement aspects of actionable gamification into your employee training program, and start generating real results.
Opportunities for Gamification in an Employee Training Program
Gamification is a versatile tool for education. It involves incorporating fun elements like points, badges, and scorecards into training courses, to put a new spin on workplace learning.
Leveraging psychology, gamification engages learners, and improves knowledge retention, while bringing teams closer together. One of the best things about gamification, is that it can be incorporated into virtually any kind of learning opportunity. Some of the best ways to use gamification in employee training include:
- Employee onboarding: An excellent employee onboarding strategy doesn’t just provide team members with the information they need to thrive in their new roles. It can also improve employee retention by up to 82%. Adding gamification to onboarding sessions is a fantastic way for businesses to introduce corporate culture, and engage new hires.
- Employee upskilling: When you’re introducing new sales and marketing strategies or software to your business, gamification can be an excellent way to get everyone on the same page. Gamified training can deliver rapid results in the business landscape, helping team members to adopt new skills and strategies quickly.
- Compliance training: No matter your go-to-market strategy, there are likely to be specific rules and regulations you need to adhere to in your business. Unfortunately, compliance can be a boring thing to learn. Incorporating gaming elements into compliance training can make the experience less strenuous, and improve knowledge retention.
- Sales training: Companies use a variety of sales techniques to convert customers and increase revenue. However, learning how to be an excellent salesperson is often a complex process. Gamification in employee training systems used for sales can help employees to develop new skills, by placing them in competitive, simulated environments.
- Leadership training: Gamification can be an excellent way to prepare new leaders for their role in your business. Gamified training sessions are often collaborative in nature, and they’re excellent for building soft skills like emotional intelligence.
In fact, virtually any aspect of your employee training program can be enhanced with gamification. Challenges, leader boards, score cards, and points can all help to make training experiences feel more exciting and interesting, for any member of staff.
Actionable Gamification: How to Implement Gamification Strategies
When it comes to employee engagement, gamification is one of the most powerful tools any business has. With the right strategies, you can instantly improve the outcomes of your employee training program, and ensure more people are likely to actually pay attention to your lessons.
The good news is that gamification is an extremely versatile strategy. There are dozens of different ways you can build gamification into your learning and development program. Here are some top tips for implementing gamification into your learning process:
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Implement gamification into existing programs
Adding actionable gamification strategies into your educational program doesn’t have to mean designing new lessons from scratch. If you already have training sessions in place for things like sales training, you can add game elements like points, badges, and leader boards into the mix to make the experience more compelling and successful.
The best gamified training strategies aren’t just about pushing employees to play through some interactive lessons. Like any training strategy, your gamified lessons should be based on specific goals and KPIs. Think about what you want to accomplish with your gamified lessons, and create a learning path that helps people to develop the right skills over time.
Some gamified learning strategies use different “levels” of lessons, which push learners to complete one section to move onto the next. This can build momentum and engagement, motivating employees to catch up with their colleagues, or achieve specific outcomes.
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Align with company culture
All learning and development efforts should be aligned with your company culture, and your wider business objectives. Before you implement any new training strategies, think about the values and priorities of your business and brand.
Aligning your learning experience with the core vision and mission of your business will help to keep all of your team members on the same track. Plus, it should help to boost the sense of connection your team members have to your business overall.
Whether you’re implementing role-based training scenarios into your employee training program, or scoreboards and badges, it’s important to ensure everyone on your team actually understands how the game works. Before your learners are set loose on content, make sure they know the goals of the training, what rules they need to follow, and how they’ll be rewarded for their achievements.
Where possible, try to keep your strategy simple. Make it easy for team members to actually understand how they can get involved with the game and achieve specific results. The more complex the game, the less likely your employees are to get involved.
One of the biggest, and most important parts of implementing gamification into learning strategies, is making sure your team members have incentives to keep them engaged. Offering your team members rewards when they actually complete a specific task will mean they’re more likely to commit to the training session, and compete against their colleagues.
The rewards you offer should be based on your knowledge of your employees, and what motivates them to keep pushing towards their goals.
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Take advantage of competition
A little competition can go a long way in the workplace. Healthy competition keeps team members motivated and inspired, and can even improve collaboration when staff members are allowed to act as part of a team. Use scoreboards and leader boards, and lightly competitive elements to keep your staff excited about your high-performance coaching strategies.
Finally, like all kinds of training strategies, you’ll be more likely to cultivate amazing results if you actually pay attention to the outcomes of your lessons. Use the right software and tools to monitor everything from employee progress to engagement levels.
The information you collect from your employee training programs will help you to determine which skills you need to work on developing more with your teams, and which strategies you should use.
Gamification Examples: Real-Life Insights from Business Leaders
Adding actionable gamification techniques to employee training systems isn’t an entirely new concept. For decades, companies across the globe have been using these strategies to connect with their employees, and improve engagement. Here are some of the top gamification examples from leading brands, and their results:
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Deloitte Leadership Academy
Perhaps one of the best gamification examples in the world today, Deloitte’s leadership academy offers an excellent insight into just how effective gamification can be. Established in 2008, the program uses gamification to improve engagement and motivate teams. Staff members can showcase their achievements on LinkedIn, and even earn rewards. By 2013, Deloitte shared their gamification strategy had improved regular participation in training sessions by 37%.
Another technology leader that has taken advantage of gamification in the past, IBM is a true innovator in this field. In 2019, the company released the results of its new digital badge pilot program, which demonstrated a 226% increase in course completion after the badges were introduced. At the same time, IBM saw a 694% increase in the number of people who actually progressed through the entire course and completed their exam.
For Roland, gamification in sales training was essential to making sure their team members could properly pitch and distribute products. Training was conducted in person to begin with, before the company began experimenting with more digital tools. By ensuring the training sessions were fun and exciting, with elements of competition, Roland was able to significantly improve engagement levels among staff members, and even improve the performance metrics of its sales team.
Getting Started with Gamification
Over the years, actionable gamification techniques have proven to be an effective and versatile way to improve workplace training. It keeps learners engaged, boosts educational outcomes, and even saves businesses time and money on imparting new knowledge and skills.
If you want to discover the benefits of gamified training for yourself, getting started couldn’t be easier. Here at HSE we offer powerful gamified training events and sessions, specially designed to leverage the power of rewards, competition, and fun experiential learning.
Sign up for one of our training experiences today.
