Gamification – How to Level Up Your Employee Training

One of your salespeople just secured the top spot in the weekly leaderboard, beating her colleagues by a handful of points. One of your engineers just added a rare medal to his growing collection of virtual trophies. In the meantime, five trainees worked together to concur the final challenge in a multi-player game.

Now, what if I told you that all this takes place during the work day and benefits your business?

All these activities are examples of gamification, a trend in educational software development that’s already common in online courses and language apps.

How gamification works

Gamified training turns tedious learning into fun. Utilizing engaging game mechanics, gamification helps trainees focus and enter a flow state while learning. This fun filled approach to training encourages an open mindset and a safe place to fail while acquiring job skills that can be applied in the field. But there’s more to gamification than just learning through play. To build a game-based training program, you need to understand where learners’ motivation comes from. There are eight drivers at the core of human motivation:

1. Epic meaning and calling?— A sense of mission that must be accomplished for the greater good. The players believe that achieving a task depends on them and benefits a broader community.
2. Development and accomplishment?— This driver refers to players’ ambition to improve their skills and progress towards achieving some goal or tackling an obstacle. The goal must be challenging to feel relevant and rewarding.
3. Empowerment of creativity and feedback?— People are naturally driven by creative endeavors and express themselves by making new things. Seeing the results of these attempts and responding to them is equally crucial.
4. Ownership and possession?— The motivation to own things is a common and powerful one. That’s why so many people pursue wealth and collect goods, both material and virtual. It’s also the reason why customization and beautification can be so enticing.
5. Social influence and relatedness?— People motivated by a range of social relations and emotions: we all want to be accepted and liked, we take care of and help each other. On the other hand, healthy rivalry can also be extremely incentivizing.
6. Scarcity and impatience?— FOMO (fear of missing out) truly exists, and it’s a powerful motivator in corporate education. When something is (or appears to be) exclusive or not easily available, we often feel the subliminal urge — and motivation — to obtain it.
7. Unpredictability and curiosity?— We often undertake activities to find out what will happen next. Also, we enjoy being surprised by the positive results of our actions.
8. Loss and avoidance?— Similarly, we?don’t?like being surprised by the negative outcomes, and we’re determined to avoid them at all costs.

How to gamify your training program

Corporate gamification is effective as it allows instructional designers to craft the study process so that it appeals to these basic drives. To that end, various mechanics can be used. Let’s review the top five of them.

Levels

By dividing your course into a series of consecutive levels, you create a sense of progression, making learners feel that they’re getting better. To reinforce this feeling, incorporate storytelling elements into the process, for instance, by comparing acquiring a skill to a journey or adventure.

Another important feature of a stage-centered course structure is setting the learning pathway. To advance to the next level, participants must prove that they’re proficient in certain skills adequate for the current stage. This way, they can easily gauge their performance, while you can objectively assess their knowledge.

Leaderboards

Leaderboards are a simple way to promote friendly competition. Ranking provides instant feedback and a visual representation of learners’ results. They also make it easy to track one’s progress in relation to other participants.

However, the tricky thing about leaderboards is their verticality — scoring low can be seriously discouraging, especially if the gap between low and high ranks seems impassable.

One solution is opting for several smaller leaderboards (e.g., for each department) instead of a single, company-wide one. Rate multiple factors and tasks to allow all team members to shine and periodically reset scores to enable new learners and old-timers to compete equally.

Rewards

A prospect of being rewarded can incentivize employees to put an extra effort into improving their skills. But remember that not all rewards will have the same effect. For example, physical prizes don’t work too well because they don’t appeal to any core drives other than ownership.

Ideally, you want to offer rewards aligned with your business and based on social recognition and a sense of achievement. It can be a badge, a LinkedIn recommendation, or an invitation to an exclusive corporate meeting.

Collaboration

Even though gamification is often associated with rivalry, it’s perfectly suited for stimulating cooperative. Collaborative tasks make individual learners responsible for the success of the entire team. Acknowledgment and helping others are both strong drives, too.

A game-based course can present participants with a seemingly impossible challenge. Everyone will need to contribute their unique skillsets to succeed. Alternatively, learners can obtain extra points for working together. The underlying purpose is to emphasize the fact that every task becomes easier when you communicate and collaborate.

Storytelling

If your goal is to influence your employees and change their behavior stories are key. Research confirms that well-designed stories are the most effective vehicle for exerting influence. Research shows that learning which stems from a well-told story is remembered more accurately, and for far longer, than learning derived from facts and figures.

Gamification can be an intimidating concept for those who are new to it. However, when you break it down, you’ll see that it’s just about making traditional learning a little more fun and engaging. For today’s employees and companies, this is more valuable than ever. Whether you’re looking for new ways to engage remote teams, a better training plan for the future, or even just a way to improve your company culture, gamification can help.

For more information go to www.thetrainingarcade.com.