Gamification at work has an essential place in corporate training programs. If you do it the right way, you can ensure your training is more successful as it makes learning more fun, engaging, and immersive. Furthermore, learners get an excellent opportunity to face challenges in a secure environment that they would come across in practical life situations. With gamification, learning difficult concepts becomes easy and exciting as it allows learners to practice their knowledge and skills in virtual setups before they actually practice them in practical life situations.
All your employees at work are likely to consider gamification for the rewards and recognition associated with it. It contributes to the enhanced motivation of your employees. Additionally, gamification boosts collaboration and develops required behavioral changes and improves the performance of your employees. If you want to apply game mechanics to your training program, it is crucial that you initially design game-based concepts and then map them to the gamification and learning objectives. Also, create learning portals that can be integrated with microlearning techniques and social learning.
Let’s explore a few gamification at work strategies that you can use to achieve your training goals.
Learning In Simulated/Virtual Environment
Businesses cannot bear any mistake in real-time situations as it not only leads to monetary loss but also hampers reputation, both of which can have many negative consequences.
To minimize such risk, you can include task-based simulations in your training program. It will enable your learners to polish their skills and find effective solutions to issues that they would come across in the real world. Gamification, when used extensively to impart training to the employees, enables them to avoid traps and pick essential tips. This helps to ensure nill failure in the real world situation. For instance, your employees use an animated game to enhance their skills. With an aim to develop some competitive skills, they can control the actions and movements of the animated characters in the game. Also, many businesses use employee onboarding software to engage their new recruits even before their first day of work.
Improved Collaboration
Apart from fostering competition through gamification at work, it also creates excellent opportunities for collaboration. For instance, a sales team of an organization whose team members don’t generally work together. Every individual of the team generally reports to their leads and closes the sales deals. Using gamification, every sales representative can combine their skills and work as a single unit. With gamification, you can incorporate team-oriented contests and ask them to accumulate the points of every team member, thereby, motivating each member to improve their performance and make contributions to the team.
When the employees share challenges and victories, it adds a sense of excitement in the game and brings everyone together. It leads to more collaborative efforts among the employees.
Addressing Short Attention Spans
You can add more meaning to learning using gamification as it breaks down concepts into small-sized fragments. Leveraging games, you can convert training into small sessions that will allow your learners to respond appropriately. You can also personalize your training materials so that the learners can better understand and grasp the concepts for a more extended period of time. Gamification allows you to make learning more engaging by incorporating simulated content in small, bite-sized formats in today’s fast-paced world of numerous diversions and decreasing attention spans.
Final Thoughts
In order to fulfill the training goals, an increasing number of organizations are adopting gamification at work. It not only helps them to eliminate the monotonous nature of classroom-based training, but it also enables the learners to use the acquired knowledge and skills and practice concepts in a virtual set up to reduce the risk of making mistakes in real-life scenarios.
