In a knowledge economy, no business can achieve and sustain high growth without making employee training and development (ET&D) an ongoing process. In addition to improving the efficiency and productivity of employees, ET&D programs keep employees motivated and enhance job satisfaction. At the same time, employee training helps businesses maintain operational efficiency by reducing the high employee turnover rate.
But your organization cannot sustain growth simply by investing in employee training. Along with creating various employee training programs, your ET&D strategies must focus on ensuring knowledge retention, knowledge application, and knowledge transfer. You can easily make employees absorb, apply, and transfer knowledge by leveraging multiple benefits of gamification in employee training.
According to Technopedia.com,
“Gamification refers to the use of game design principles to improve customer engagement in non-game businesses. The specific methods used range from the creation of reward schedules to creating levels of achievement via status and badges. Companies use gaming principles to increase interest in a product or service, or simply to deepen their customers’ relationship with the brand.”
At present, gamification is one of the hottest trends in corporate training and employee training. Many enterprises transform their existing employee training courses by adding popular game features like points, badges, and coins. At the same time, enterprises create new employee training programs based on various principles of gamification. That is why; you can easily make your organization’s ET&D strategies successful and impactful by leveraging several benefits of gamification in employee training.
Understanding Important Benefits of Gamification in Employee Training
Let’s understand the 9 Important Benefits of Gamification in Employee Training.
1) Make Learners a Part of ET&D Process
While playing video games or mobile games, players often imagine themselves as a character within the game. They further love to share their experience and achievements by becoming an integral part of the games. When you develop employee training programs based on applying gamification principles, the employees will visualize themselves as a part of the ET&D process. They will acquire new knowledge and hone their professional skills continuously by accessing these gamified courses just like popular mobile games.
2) Promote Active Learner Engagement
You can use EL&D as a tool to drive business growth only when employees feel engaged and motivated instead of getting bored. Non-gamified training often makes employees abandon training programs by making them get bored.
The gamification statistics posted on Finances Online suggest that
“49% of employees tend to get bored with non-gamified training.”
You can make your ET&D strategies impactful only by replacing and converting non-gamified employee training programs. You can motivate and persuade employees to acquire knowledge and skills after working hours only by adding game features to existing training programs.
3) Gamify Every Employee Training Program
The new-age elearning solutions come with built-in features and options to facilitate employee training gamification. You can invest in the right elearning solution to gamify existing employee training programs and create gamified employee training programs by adding badges, coins, points, and similar game features.
Also, you can leverage the elearning solution to gamify a wide variety of employee training – onboarding, sales, technical, compliance, customer service, leadership, and soft skills. The gamification will help you to get a higher ROI by ensuring knowledge retention and knowledge transfer. You can further create a culture of learning by gamifying all employee training programs.
4) Provide Instant Feedback to Learners
Gamification makes employees complete various training programs quickly. Many employees even earn rewards by acquiring knowledge and skill regularly. At the same time, gamified training programs provide instant feedback to every learner. Hence, the learner must acquire specific knowledge or skill to move to the next level.
For instance, a learner has to acquire advanced skills regularly to move from the novice level to the experienced level. Also, he can acquire the relevant knowledge and skills by identifying the knowledge gap based on instant feedback. An employee can further put in extra time and effort to understand the topics or concepts that are difficult to understand and remember.
5) Support Learning Experience Customization
The gamified training programs keep employees motivated and excited by giving rewards in the form of badges and coins. But an employee can achieve the reward and move to the next level only by completing specific challenges or clearing online tests. That is why; every employee has to find and create her own learning path according to knowledge, skills, and experience.
She can acquire the knowledge or skills by accessing the appropriate digital content. Likewise, she can start at a lower level and move to the next level only after acquiring the required knowledge. The learning experience customization enables every employee to acquire knowledge and skills in her own way and according to her precise learning goals.
6) Ensure Knowledge Retention
Most organizations these days use elearning solutions to enable employees to acquire knowledge and skills in their preferred ways – reading an ebook, watching a video, or listening to an audiobook/podcast. They can make the multi-format digital content more engaging and effective by adding game features and elements.
According to Finances Online,
“Knowledge retention increases by 30% if an oral and/or text-based presentation is accompanied by images, infographics, and other types of visuals.”
Hence, your organization can gamify employee training to achieve two key objectives – knowledge retention and knowledge transfer.
7) Improve Employee Efficiency and Productivity
In addition to engaging and motivating employees, gamified training programs make them feel more productive.
According to the gamification statistics posted on Review42,
“90% of employees feel more productive when using gamification.”
The enhanced employee productivity is essential for your business to improve operational efficiency and drive growth. Also, motivated employees will boost the efficiency and productivity of their coworkers by making knowledge transfer a continuous process. That is why; the number of enterprises gamifying their employee training programs has been increasing steadily.
8) Create and Encourage Team Spirit
Mobile games keep players excited by making them compete with each other. You can foster healthy competition and collaboration in your organization by leveraging the benefits of gamification in employee training. Healthy competition will help employees feel like being part of a single team despite working in a virtual and distributed environment. The team spirit will make them ensure business continuity and improve operational efficiency by cooperating and collaborating with each other from different geographic locations.
9) Option to Integrate with Microlearning
Your organization can transform ET&D by integrating gamification with another popular corporate training trend – microlearning. As a holistic online learning approach, microlearning promotes knowledge retention through small learning units and short-term learning activities.
It enables employees to acquire knowledge and skills regularly and conveniently by accessing information in small but focused chunks. You can easily transform the employee training programs by adding game elements and applying gamification principles while creating microlearning lessons.
You can easily leverage these benefits of gamification in employee training by choosing the right learning management system (LMS). It is always important to choose LMS software that supports learning experience gamification by providing built-in features like badges and coins. However, you also need to ensure that the LMS solution helps you to adopt other hottest employee training trends like mobile learning, blended learning, microlearning, and social learning.
