The Role of Gamification in Enhancing Employee Training

A lot of work processes can lead to burnout and lots of companies struggle with training and retaining their employees. Gamification is a relatively new way to address these issues, and you might want to try it as soon as possible.

We’ve partnered with the founder of Slot.Day, Michael Slot, to help you better understand how gamification techniques can increase productivity and create a healthier workplace environment.

What is gamification in employee training?

To put it simply, gamification in employee training is the process of adding game elements to work-related tasks to make them feel more rewarding and memorable, increasing employee motivation and diversifying their working experience.

There’s no denying that games are fun, and a lot of the time they are significantly more enjoyable than most tasks that people have to deal with at work. After all, employees often get paid to do work that no one else would want to do otherwise, and the usual reward for it is being compensated financially. However, a lot of the time, routine, tedious, repetitive, and simply boring work tasks lead to a lack of motivation, burnout, and overall dissatisfaction among employees.

Gamification aims to make the situation better in two ways. First of all, it aims to make the work process more interesting and meaningful for the employee by providing extra incentives to achieve certain results. Secondly, gamification tries to increase motivation levels, and, by extension, the overall productivity of the team.

It is important to note that gamification can be used not just to add variety, but also to make the training process more exciting and effective. A great example of it would be leaderboards that showcase how members of the team achieve success in certain areas of their training, or badges that are given to the team members who have finished their new course. Games can also be used as learning tools themselves, although this, admittedly, is a huge topic that deserves its own article.

Gamification and its implementation

While there are potentially infinite numbers of ways a company can implement gamification elements in its workflow, some of the methods have become somewhat common and standardized over the years.

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Points

Earning points by completing daily tasks is a very common gamification practice, and it can add a whole new level to the employee’s routine. Admittedly, by themselves, points tend to lose their meaning after a while if they cannot be exchanged for anything and only provide bragging rights.

However, some companies might use point systems to offer some extra benefits for workers — like offering a new unlockable style for their dashboard, or something else. These rewards are usually not associated with extra financial incentives or similar things due to legal requirements, so they might not appeal to more pragmatic workers, but even then seeing your score increase a bit can still provide some extra satisfaction.

Badges

As Michael Slot explains, unlike faceless points, badges can be much more nuanced and personalized and help employees feel seen and valued. A lot of casino games as well as game distribution services add achievements to personalize the experience and add value to it, and various workplaces can rely on these techniques too.

For example, adding badges for years of service, special accomplishments, or even inside jokes can motivate workers and increase their mood, leading to a more healthy and productive working environment.  

Leaderboards

As we’ve mentioned, leaderboards use some employees’ competitive spirit to increase their productivity and boost motivation. Think of how casinos use this technique in the Chicken Road game to keep players invested, for example. A worker might not be particularly interested in the project they are working on, but they will feel a personal connection to their name appearing on the leaderboard, and that can prove beneficial for everyone in the workplace.

Levels

Levels are very similar to points, and often these two ways of gamification are used interchangeably or in combination — for instance, employees might need to earn a certain number of points to achieve a level-up that will unlock certain bonuses. When used correctly, levels might feel more meaningful than points, but this also might not last without proper rewards.

Challenges

Challenges can provide a personal or collective goal to achieve and therefore can be used to either increase the focus on individual effort or collaboration. Although properly implementing challenges and adjusting them to the work environment is rather difficult, when done right, it can be quite an effective way to boost motivation and morale.

Benefits of gamification in training

Now that we’ve covered some of the most common gaming practices in both training and working processes, let’s discuss what exactly makes gamification so beneficial and why companies are willing to implement it. As we’ve covered the motivation and productivity aspect already, we’ll cover other benefits here to provide you with a more detailed picture.

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Improved knowledge retention

Some employees find gamified training to be more effective for them. Although it might not be a universal experience, it isn’t rare to hear that some workers can memorize instructions and work processes better when they are presented in a gamified form, meaning that this form of training can be highly beneficial for these people.

Real-time feedback and progress tracking

As Michael Slot notes, gamified systems can help with tracking progress and receiving real-time feedback on the effectiveness of the whole training process. Points, levels, and badges can show just how quickly employees learn using a specific course and how well they perform based on it — although, admittedly, all of those scores have to be used in combination with other metrics and not as a single source of truth.

Encouragement of healthy competition and collaboration

Maintaining a friendly competitive spirit in the workplace can be great for productivity and can also make the work process significantly more captivating for those involved with it. However, it is worth noting that some workers find competition stressful and would rather not participate in it, and a proper gamification system should address these employees and provide them with a way to avoid it if they feel like it.

How to integrate gamification practices into the employee training process

Aligning gamification with business and learning goals

Gamification has to help businesses and employees deal with hurdles they encounter — it should be used as a solution to a specific problem. For instance, gamification might prove to be way less useful in jobs that don’t have any established workflows or universal metrics of success — it is difficult to imagine that investigative journalists can find any use for it, for example. The same goes for researchers, archaeologists, and many other professions.

We’re not saying that it is entirely impossible — just mostly unintuitive and likely to fail. However, bringing some excitement and a sense of competition into a rather repetitive office workflow can do wonders.

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What’s important to remember is that there are lots of different gamification strategies one can use, and your goal is to ensure that your strategy aligns with your goals. If you want to make teamwork more efficient, introducing personal challenges is not the right way to do it, for example.

Keeping the system intuitive and user-friendly

Gamification should be simple, intuitive, and straightforward. If employees don’t fully understand the rules of the game, they won’t be interested in participating. Even worse, spending time and effort on decoding your game instead of focusing on their primary responsibilities is actively detrimental and ruins the whole purpose of gamification in the first place. Design your game rules to be user-friendly first and foremost and you will avoid this mistake.

Using rewards and recognition strategically

Games are fun while they last. If your game can be finished in a matter of a single day, then it has to adjust for it and provide daily challenges. If not, employees will quickly lose interest in it, since it is basically ignorable and provides little to no emotional response. The same goes for a game that sets unachievable goals. As soon as your employees realize that it would take them way too long to get the level up or win something, they will stop working toward that goal.

Rewards and recognition should be both meaningful and timely. When done right, you will end up with a system that regularly provides some fun and excitement and yet still offers some next objective for the employee to work for. Admittedly, creating a balanced game might take some time and a few failed attempts, but it is worth it in the end.

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Regularly updating content and challenges

Even if the game is great and fun, it still needs occasional updates to keep employees invested, especially considering that they will most likely reach their final goals regularly. Make sure that you are always one step ahead and can come up with new interesting challenges and rewards so that the game never gets stale.

Measuring effectiveness and making adjustments

The last part is quite tricky. Measuring effectiveness is obviously highly important since the whole purpose of gamification revolves around it, and yet understanding its impact can be quite challenging. In fact, there are so many variables involved, that a lot of the time, the analysis process can prove to be extremely difficult.

However, if a business owner wants to increase productivity, employee satisfaction, and other important metrics, they have to come up with proper ways to measure them so that they can make necessary adjustments to the system rather than using it inefficiently or giving up on it entirely. This is why we would recommend making all of these considerations before you start implementing gamification practices — otherwise, you might find yourself in trouble.

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