Many employees groan at the idea of workplace training because it often involves long lectures and loads of boring paperwork. Fortunately, you can now give your employees an exciting, experiential learning experience by incorporating gamification into their training.
Gamification of workplace training is the integration of gaming elements and ideologies into your employee learnings for better engagement, inspiration, and retention of information. If you want to transform your workplace with gamification, we’ll dive into some key considerations for incorporating games into your training programs in this article.
Gamification is applied through specific procedures and tools, including experience points, rewards and recognition, badges, accolades, leaderboards, and progress bars (among others). Many leaders and operations managers point to the benefits they reap from workplace gamification, proving that gamification actually works.
Here are some effective workplace training gamification tactics you can adopt in your organization:
Create a leaderboard to display top-performing employees throughout the training. It can foster healthy competition, and employees will take the training seriously.
Alternatively, you can train employees in groups and encourage them to compete. The group that completes the training tasks and assessments first and with the fewest mistakes earns the top spot on the leaderboard.
Employee training programs don’t have to be mind-numbing and devoid of fun. Incorporating game-like elements into programs helps your employees stay focused.
Allow your employees to earn points and rewards when they complete specific tasks, assessments, and modules. The rewards can be virtual or physical, depending on your budget and your employee’s preference. Some common rewards include badges, certificates, gift cards, days off, etc.
Divide your training programs into several levels that trainees progress through. They’ll progress to the next level when they complete a set of tasks and tests. The levels of training become progressively more challenging, allowing you to assess every skill and ability your employees acquire.
Create work-related quests and challenges like simulations, problem-solving tasks, and interactive scenarios. If you’re training a sales team, use sales games to motivate employees like simulating an interaction between a sales agent and a potential client.
Structure your training modules as quests and challenges to make them more interesting and engaging. Trainees complete these quests to progress to the next level of training.
Gamification can turn mundane tasks and systems into game-like environments to improve user experience and engagement. Its benefits include:
With so much information to absorb, it’s easy to forget the important parts of your training, especially if the training process is boring. Gamification introduces interactive and fun elements to training to help reinforce learning and improve knowledge retention.
Gamification keeps employees stay engaged and excited about the training because it makes the learning process fun and collaborative.
Gamification creates an environment of collaboration because your employees have to work together to complete tasks and challenges as part of the training and in their daily work lives.
You can keep your employees motivated throughout the training with rewards and acknowledgment whenever they complete specific tasks, challenges, and assessments.
Allowing your employees to simulate scenarios gives them the skills and confidence they need to handle real-life situations professionally.
People have different learning styles and acquire knowledge at different paces. This is why you should personalize your training programs with gaming elements that accommodate diverse employee groups.
Gamification of workplace training creates a more effective and fun learning experience that enhances employee development and performance. If you’re looking for ideas on how to gamify your employee training, turn to Centrical.
Centrical is a gamified employee engagement and performance management platform. We make employees the focal point of the process, delivering personalized insights and AI-guided actions for improvement.