Gamification ideas for training are in high demand in various sectors. With good reason too. Employee training is vital to keep your workforce at their best, whether that’s meeting customers’ ever-changing needs, adapting to new technology or upskilling and broadening their horizons.
Unfortunately, traditional methods of training are no longer enough – as many employers find out the hard way. In this post, we’ll discuss the importance of upskilling your workforce and the role of gamification in training and development.
Plus, you can also see a real example of gamification training and how an Australian-based bank saw advocation of their digital offering rise from 9% to 59%.
The importance of employee training
“You don’t build a business, you build people, then people build the business.” This quote from American author, salesman and motivational speaker Zig Ziglar, highlights exactly why employee training is so vital. Far from being replaceable cogs in a machine that perform a basic function, modern employees are what drive businesses forward and make them great.
That’s especially true in the digital age, when technology is continually changing the way people work. That applies in the broadest sense, as we’ve seen since the coronavirus outbreak with more people than ever working remotely. It also affects day-to-day tasks with employees required to use new applications and software. Finally, it impacts the way customers support is provided – whether it’s their own preference for digital communication or a company’s strategy to migrate them to digital channels.
Technology aside, employee training also has a range of other purposes and benefits:
- Familiarising staff with new or updated legislation or company policies
- Improving awareness of brand values or company ethics
- Boosting cybersecurity awareness and competence
- Meeting first aid training requirements outlined in the Health and Safety Regulations 1981
- Providing opportunities for employee development to improve staff loyalty
The problem with traditional ideas for training
Staff training has always been part and parcel of the workplace. Traditionally, it’s taken the form of presentations, classroom lessons, group learning and one-to-one sessions. Of course, there will also be hands-on work when it comes to first aid, software training or health and safety.
More recently, in the past decade or so, we’ve seen the advent of e-learning, which some still see as an innovative approach. Unfortunately, it isn’t. In most cases, e-learning is essentially the same training ideas for employees, delivered digitally. It’s presentations, classroom lessons and group learning through a screen.
Whether it’s traditional e-learning or even more traditional presentations and group sessions, conventional training methods lack a key ingredient that’s required to achieve the best results – namely, employee engagement. If employees aren’t engaged with training, there’s much less chance they will complete it, let alone actually take information in.
How gamification training can help
Gamified training is an alternative to traditional ideas that puts engagement at the heart of your development approach. In simple terms, it refers to the use of game thinking and mechanics into the training and development process. Doing so makes them more enjoyable, interesting and – above all else – engaging.
Gamification makes people more motivated to complete training, with a cycle of challenge, achievement and reward. This tried-and-tested methodology create a value exchange, which incentivises the completion of activities, delivering a positive outcome for both employees and employers.
Rather than feeling forced to complete training or ‘getting it out of the way’, employees will be intrinsically and extrinsically motivated. Intrinsically, employees get the satisfaction of taking part in a fun process. Extrinsically, they’ll be driven by positive rewards for their activity. In other words, they’ll actually want to take part in and complete their training.
An example of gamification in training and development
A case in point when it comes to gamified training came through our collaboration with a major Australian bank. They had already invested heavily in digital transformation to change how customers were attracted, retained and engaged with. The problem? Employees were struggling to migrate customers to digital channels. That stemmed from their uncertainty or inability to help customers with digital solutions.
As discussed above, traditional training and e-learning was seen as too generic and passive. The bank needed training that was targeted at different employees’ needs as well as being dynamic and engaging to avoid new information being lost before adoption.
Using our Voco platform, we created a personalized interactive training journey that informs employees on how to support customers migrating from physical transactions to digital channels. Most importantly, it engages users with bite-sized content including interactive videos, customer scenarios and follow-up assessments. That’s paired with various rewards for extrinsic motivation:
- Points to improve their leaderboard ranking
- Badges for their achievement wall
- Entries into a prize draw
The impact of gamified training
Once developed, our gamification training solution was rolled out to Australian bankers and promoted by business leaders and internal divisional communications. Despite being voluntary, the training was accessed by over 7,000 employees with a completion rate of 88%.
The bank saw advocation of their digital offering rise from 9% up to 59% of their banker workforce. Overall confidence in the offering increased by 77 points. Additionally, the bank has seen an increase in mobile logins and product sales through its digital channels, with a reduction in over-the-counter transactions and call centre calls.
Using a data capture framework, the solution automatically measured completion, time on task and engagement. This was paired with granular quiz and assessment results, plus a survey before and after the program to assess digital banking confidence.
Paired with user feedback requesting more regular updates and continued micro-learning experience, this allowed content to be refined with the right supporting materials, as well as planning future learning initiatives. They are now staging a roll-out of solutions across more business units and geographical regions.
Gamification ideas for training your employees
At 3radical, we take a bespoke approach to gamification in training and development. Our team aims to understand your requirements, challenges and preferences before developing a gamified training solution that’s tailored to your organization and your employees.
Please don’t hesitate to contact our team to talk more about your training ideas for employees.