We hate to break it to you, but sometimes a regular old Health & Safety Powerpoint just doesn’t inspire passion in a team, no matter how important your department head insists it is.
But, if there’s one thing we know at The Improv Agency, it’s that having fun is the key to great quality training. And one of the best ways to make that training fun is through gamification. If you’re not sure what that involves, it’s exactly what it sounds like: making the process like a game, with goals, rewards and education delivered through fun, competitive exercises.
Not only is it enjoyable in itself, but it’s proven to get results. In fact, in a recent study, 72% of employees said that gamification inspired them to work harder, and gamification participants have also been shown to score 14% higher in skill-based assessments.
In this case, it’s not so much work hard, play hard; as play hard, work hard.
Gamification in business can improve the effectiveness of training, employee engagement, and bring all-important fun to your workplace. Here’s what you need to know…
What is gamification?
Gamification is all about increasing engagement: gamifying the lesson you want your staff to learn requires them to be involved and interact with it. Even more importantly, gamification in business can turn otherwise dry topics into exciting and inspiring ones – something that we at The Improv Agency are total advocates for when it comes to improving your business and employee satisfaction.
Gamification in training
While gamification can be used to improve productivity and for team building, one of its best applications is for training programs. It’s a great way to turn dull subjects into something exciting. Plus, fun training is more memorable and therefore more effective, and as a result, also means your company will spend less money in the long run in retraining staff who weren’t engaged with the course the first time round.
It’s a fact, too: in a survey, almost 80% of students said that they would be more productive if their work was more game-like.
So, how can you use gamification when it comes to training? The idea of gamifying your business can easily be used to onboard new employees and teach them your company’s processes, retrain current staff, teach employees about new products or policies, teach employees about new technology in the business, and to help employees develop their skills in various areas.
How to use gamification in your own training schemes
You can gamify your training regime today. Take your onboarding process: do you want to bore an employee from their very first day on the job? Excite them and stoke their enthusiasm for their new role by throwing out the old paperwork and presentations and gamifying it, instead.
You can also look to gamification to improve the results from your current training schemes: it’ll make the lessons more memorable, and ultimately more effective. Switch boring Powerpoint presentations and handouts to interactive quizzes, role play scenarios and more.
How to create a great gamification training course
So, you can see the clear benefits and want to gamify your training. Now, how do you do it? Actually, it’s not so complicated – there are some clear steps and common elements which you can include to ensure an engaging game.
To make a really effective gamified training course, first you need to be clear in what you want the takeaways of it to be: you need the content in place before you can gamify it.
Think about what you want your employees to learn from the session, as well as the end goals you’re looking to achieve. After this, you can build the steps of the game around them.
Now comes the fun of building a great game around the learning points. The trick to making an engaging gamified training course is in using the psychology of motivation. There are four big factors in this, which when combined, make the perfect gamified training course. Here’s what you need to include:
Motivation
Have a reward be part of the training – whether it’s a valuable prize, fun trophy, or even just points or badges. Being able to see the success of learning will motivate your employees to join in with the course.
Control
Like in a video game, for example, your employees should feel like what they are doing actually has an impact on the game. Include elements where they have control over their actions in the gamified training, and over the path of their learning.
An obvious path to success
Great gamification should make it clear how the employees can succeed in it – for example, they might have to answer a certain amount of quiz questions correctly to ‘win’ that particular topic.
Competition
An element of competition can provide great motivation amongst staff – set this in motion with point systems or leaderboards, and a prize if possible, and let your employee’s competitive nature do the rest.
How to use gamification with the training you already have
The good news is that it’s easier than you might think to make the training you already have in your business fun through gamification. Yes, even that old Health & Safety training. Just keep in mind the above principles of engaging gamification, and you can easily turn the lessons you already have into an interactive course that your staff will actually remember.
Take the lessons in your existing training course, and add in interactive elements such as quizzes, competitions, scoreboards and challenges to make those points.
If you want to motivate staff further to engage with the training concepts, you can even up the stakes and the competition by offering a prize to the person with the highest score at the end, such as a gift card or experiential treat.
Why you should try gamification in your business training today
Overall, gamifying your training increases engagement through competition, motivation and fun which ultimately makes the lessons you’re teaching more memorable than they ever have been. This kind of training not only keeps employees interested and their morale boosted, but means you can effectively teach new business knowledge once – and know they’ll take it on board. Even better, gamifying your training is simple (and can even be totally free) to implement once you understand the basic concepts of great games.
Ready to bring gamification to your business? Contact us and find out about this and other ways to make your business more fun, and at the same time, more effective. Game on.
