4 Ways to Use Gamification for Onsite Training

Gamification, as a training tool, has been a driver of innovation in the learning and development space for several years, and is poised for continued exponential growth. Projections reveal that 87% of businesses intend to use gamification techniques in the next five years. Additionally, half of these companies have made gamification a top priority. These projections reveal that the incorporation of gamification into traditional corporate-training modules is integral to future success.

Moreover, a primary advantage for companies is that the majority of employees have access to a mobile phone, whether smart or feature, which can be used to access such programmes. Yet what are the specific benefits of gamification for frontline employees? And how does it relate to employee engagement?

First, let us take a look at exactly how gamification can be used.

1. Enhancing Health and Safety Compliance

In a game, the goal is to win. In safety, the goal is to engage in safe behaviour. Gamification can encourage employees to take ownership of their safety responsibilities by tapping into motivating factors.

Do you have to play an actual game? No, but you can still apply the motivating elements of a game without turning the exercise into a game. You can reward your employees with in-game currency, or tokens for adhering to certain safety requirements, which they can then spend to customise their avatar. You can also award badges for specific compliance accomplishments, which they can display on their profile.

Benefits of Safety Gamification

  • It makes safety training more accessible, affording employees who may struggle to fully grasp complex safety regulations or rules a potentially fun way to connect and develop an understanding of safety protocols.
  • Training becomes a more engaging experience; helping to communicate the seriousness of safety topics and introducing them in a way that captures your employees’ interest.
  • It creates an easy-to-use mechanism that promotes frequent and focused information dissemination, improving employee knowledge retention.
  • It includes an instant feedback loop that reinforces the progress made through training – intrinsically motivating employees to complete each task successfully.
  • Mobile phones bring greater accessibility to an ‘anywhere, anytime’ training, enabling your workforce to learn at a time and place of their preference.
  • Cost-effective training models remove the burden of hiring and retaining extensive training staff.
  • It scales back the need for in-person classroom sessions and advances the blended training environment.

Sure-fire Tips

Revolve your gamification techniques around engagement. Think about which features in gaming will engage your employees, such as:

  • Small rewards for achievements or milestones.
  • Providing positive feedback for employees who obtain certain goals.
  • Additional challenges for top-performing employees, which are then connected to additional rewards.

The key is turning your safety and compliance training into something beyond the ordinary. If you are able to connect learning to a reward system where employees anticipate positive benefits upon the completion of certain tasks, you are on the path to success. And, if you can get employees to work together to bolster their progress, you can simultaneously reach important safety objectives and boost teamwork.

2. Expediting Safety-related Incident Reporting

Employees should feel comfortable reporting any injuries, unsafe situations, or near-misses to their employer. But this is not always the case. Employees are scared to report incidents, either because they are worried about getting into trouble or because they assume their employer will not make any changes anyway.

Including reporting incidents as part of your gamification innovations is quite simple. It is especially true if you introduce it as part of a reward system.

Example of a Gamification Reporting Feature

  • Each employee has a specific user profile which could be linked to an employee ID or email address
  • They sign in, report, and (based on a set of conditions), receive virtual trophies and badges.
  • Each report is reviewed and rated for quality by a team of moderators (supervisors, department heads, or safety managers).

You can add further positive reinforcement by giving physical rewards to employees who obtain specific badges or high rankings at the end of a certain period (end of the quarter or the year, for instance).

For employees with feature phones, there are ways to create games using unstructured supplementary data. This ensures full employee participation, regardless of mobile device capability.

3. Improving your Product Training Strategy

A learning process where participants lose without serious consequences is conducive to a heightened learning experience.

Learning accelerates when progress happens through trial and error. When your employees are able to fail in a risk-free environment, their willingness to experiment grows.

No training method achieves this more efficiently than gamification. When it comes to product training, gamification will:

  • Improve onboarding and product engagement (it is more fun and appealing).
  • Shorten a product’s time-to-value (through specific learning goals).
  • Facilitate an opportunity to see real-world applications through a simulated training environment.
  • Provide real-time feedback.
  • Promote lifelong engagement with a product (employees may require continual training throughout a product’s life cycle).
  • Make it easier to track the pain points of a product (employee performance in a simulated training environment can make it easy to track the pain points of different kinds of users when engaging with your product. This is invaluable for your product development team).

4. Deepening Collaboration and Communication

Fact: Gamification increases employee engagement by 60% and productivity by 50%.

This is because games encourage:

  • Collaboration
  • Problem-solving
  • Communication
  • Experimentation, and
  • Identity exploration

These characteristics promote success in a rapidly changing information-based culture and contribute value to organisation’s using gamification as part of their learning process.

Key Takeaways

Using gamification as an element of your learning systems will improve the employee experience, and make learning more fun so that employees are more likely to retain the information they have been taught.

If you would like to find out more about introducing gamification into your employee training programmes, talk to an Employee Engagement Expert today.

Unleash Tomorrow.