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Gamified Learning
How can gamification improve employee engagement in learning?
Enhancing employee engagement through gamified learning has proven to be highly effective. By incorporating elements of fun, short gameplay, and friendly competition, many organisations are successfully sharing crucial information while achieving tangible outcomes. Integrating gaming strategies into professional tasks offers a captivating and enjoyable approach to foster development and active participation.
What is gamification in learning?
Gamification is the practice of placing the principles of gameplay into a traditionally non-game scenario. It can be utilised within the workplace to increase employee engagement, provide something exciting to participate in and ultimately have a positive impact on productivity. Depending on the purpose of the content, it can be available as an integrated part of an LMS system or a standalone app.
Offering gamification in employee training means that learners will be more engaged. The information is likely to stick due to the repetitive nature of the gameplay and the more casual, fun elements involved that don’t mean sitting through a corporate presentation.
Using Gamification in employee training
Although gamification in employee training turns organisational content into a game – it by no means devalues or discredits the information.
There are various ways gamification can be used within a work environment to offer support to employees. It depends on the requirements set out by the company as to the purpose of the gamification but a few include:
• employee training to upskill or move employees into different roles
• feeding important company information to new hires who are going through the onboarding process
• sharing company values and updates.
Examples of businesses who were able to successfully use gamification to improve employee engagement include:
• T-Mobile, who increased their employee participation with the launch of T-Community, in which members earned points when they interacted with content, completed training and answered peer questions
• Audi introduced a virtual training programme which had employees interact with customers in a computer game-like setting and face challenging situations
• HP were able to upskill their sales team on the topic of cybersecurity with the creation of league style gameplay which encouraged friendly competition.
These cases demonstrate that the creation of fun and interactive learning methods encourage progression and fulfillment within a company. Not only are they a great way to reward employees for their efforts and achievements, they have all garnered tangible results for the company too.
Using gamification to improve employee engagement
Adding game-like features such as point scoring, problem-solving and rewards around important topics is a great way for employees to take in vital information.
Below are 5 ways that gamification can help employees with the learning they need to undertake at work and increase their engagement with the topics they need to be aware of.
1. Drives engagement with content
Adding gamified learning can help lift your content, making it more exciting and engaging. By making training both informative and exciting, learners are encouraged to interact, which leads to better recall of information.
2. The feeling of achievement
The feeling of achievement is directly linked to the release of dopamine, also known as the happy chemical. It’s no wonder that dopamine is released when the feeling that comes with winning or doing well at something is satisfying.
This positive feeling will encourage engagement with the learning and specific content, such as understanding the company values. And when your employees are seeing progress – they’ll feel really good about it!
3. Accessible and mobile friendly
Having an accessible model which encourages ‘pick up and play’ means users can gain the knowledge they need for any given task; at the exact moment they need it.
The gamified learning app is easily accessible from a mobile device and with so many people attached to their phones, it can be a simple and effective way to spend some down time without even realising how much important information is being absorbed. Your employees can learn in this way, whenever and wherever suits them.
4. Short sessions of learning
Taking facts and details in through smaller, bitesize chunks is a proven way to digest information effectively. With the Access gamified learning solution for example, a complete game can last only two minutes. This makes it far easier for gamers to start a challenge without needing to sacrifice a big chunk of their day. This also makes it likelier for an employee to open the game more frequently as they can fit a short game into a pocket of free time.
5. Creating a personalised experience
Personalised avatars place the learner at the heart of the game – and competing against colleagues’ avatars makes you forget you may be working in isolation.
Users can customise their avatars with branded clothing so that they’re amongst a tribe of people working towards the same objective. It also offers players a more tailored experience and will likely lead to them picking up and playing the game more often, without feeling like they have to.
How engagement in gamified learning can benefit an organisation
With gamified learning encouraging a better experience, increased engagement with training material and increased recall of information, many benefits for employees also have a strong positive impact for the organisation as a whole.
1. A workforce that is happier to learn
When faced with interactive quizzes and incentivised competition based learning, employees are more productive, leading to them engaging further with the content they are presented with.
This will likely encourage them to seek out and participate in additional training materials, knowing that they will find enjoyment within it.
2. Learning targets are met
Whist gamified learning offers a fun experience, it is important to remember that the specific information embedded within the content is essential for employees to learn.
This could be for company culture and onboarding, updates for sales representatives or refreshing safety procedures.
Providing the essential information in a fun and interactive way will ensure that the tasks not only get completed, but that they are done so with enthusiasm. In turn, training targets are more likely to consistently be met on time.
3. Enhances teamwork
Gamification encourages engagement with colleagues, which can build strong and positive working relationships in a natural way. With many people working from home or remotely these days, it is essential that colleagues can discuss work topics but also have fun together in order to form genuine connections.
Gamified learning combines the two with ease.
4. A knowledgeable and able workforce
This leads us to what must be the ultimate organisational focus – a workforce made up of people with the knowledge, skills and commitment to consistently perform their roles to the highest level.
Giving them the tools they need to be able to work at peak performance ensures they can both do their job well and strive to learn more.
Gamification of learning, when used properly, can produce a wealth of benefits for both your learners and your organisation. This approach to learning should allow for the creation of meaningful content, rather than introduced just to make training and development more engaging for the sake of it. Gamified learning gives targets, and these targets give purpose.
The Access Group’s Digital Learning General Manager Christian Foerg comments:
“Gamification reduces the barriers to learning by meeting the modern learner where they are and offering a training programme that meets their needs, therefore increasing engagement and improving information retention.”
Gamified Learning Solutions
The Access Digital Learning Platform provides a range of fun and interactive solutions for employee engagement, company compliance and staff retention.
This includes a wide range of eLearning courses for different sectors, career development support, Learning Management Software and digital gamification for employee engagement, in the form of Gamebrain.
Gamebrain empowers organisations to create and rapidly deploy their own quizzes on whatever subjects they deem suitable. This, combined with the ‘pick-up-and-play’ nature of the app, means users can gain the knowledge they need for any given task; at the exact moment they need it.
