Keeping employee motivation and engagement at a high level can be a constant challenge for any HR leader, right? Fortunately, in recent years a powerful tool has emerged to help us address this issue: gamification.
By integrating game elements into various facets of work life, companies can heighten employee engagement, improve performance, and even foster a more collaborative and creative working environment. In fact, gamification at work is expected to achieve an annual growth rate of 7.67% until 2027. Do you want to know why more and more companies are applying gamification to their processes, and in particular to their training schemes? Read on for the answers!
Imagine if your employees could earn points and rewards for completing their workplace safety training. In this scenario, wouldn’t they be more motivated to do so? Well, that’s exactly how gamification works: by applying classic game elements to activities that would normally have nothing to do with them, in order to achieve specific objectives.
The concept of gamification is not entirely new – companies have been using gamified elements such as rewards, rankings or levels to motivate their employees in various ways for many years. However, due to recent changes – such as the rapid digitalization of company processes and the adoption of e-learning training methods to replace traditional ones – it has become an intensely growing market.
The main objective of gamification at work is to make training activities more fun and enjoyable, motivate employees, and increase engagement and completion rates.
According to a study by Mordor Intelligence, the gamification market reached a value of 10.19 million dollars in 2020, and that figure is expected to exceed 38 million dollars by 2026. The reason is simple – applying gamification to training processes increases motivation, stimulates interaction between participants, and improves knowledge retention.
Gamification is also ideal for strengthening employee loyalty and bringing about a lasting change in their behavior. Furthermore, by integrating it into training, you can present learning as an attractive, challenging and rewarding endeavor, while providing employees with a safe space to put their skills and competencies into practice.
Looking for more reasons to try it? Here are some statistics:
To get the most out of gamification, it’s essential to adopt a number of key strategies to help you maximize its impact. Be sure to put into practice the following tips and tricks:
In order to make gamification truly effective, it’s important to integrate certain basic elements. Using these will help you keep professionals motivated during their training experience. Here are some of the fundamental gamification elements:
Rankings give players a means of visualizing their progress and determining how well they are doing compared to others. They can be organized by individuals or by teams. This element allows the competitive spirit of employees to emerge, and also encourages greater collaboration and participation.
Celebrate and reward your employees’ achievements with badges, which are visible to all those participating in the training. This element appeals to the pride of professionals, and motivates them to continue learning in order to obtain more badges. These can be offered for completing specific challenges, or reaching certain levels of experience.
Motivate your employees with points and rewards that they can earn throughout the game, adding additional challenges to keep them involved and engaged. For example, when an employee notices that they can earn points to level up a badge by completing a specific game or activity, they are likely to feel a sense of accomplishment, motivating them to continue with their training.
Help your employees to achieve their pedagogical objectives while having fun, with quizzes and multimedia questions. This gamification element gives users the opportunity to choose the correct answer from various options by either sliding, filling in, or selecting an image from different options. Crucially, knowledge retention has been shown to increase by up to 30% when multimedia elements such as images and videos are included in training.
Construct a learning path for your professionals by integrating a system of levels into your training. This is one of the most commonly used elements in gamified training because it helps to improve employee commitment to learning. As a student overcomes levels, they will feel more motivated to continue, especially when a reward awaits them at the end of the sequence.
In addition to the elements discussed above, there are various gamification activities you can use to energize your training project and heighten its impact.
This type of game or activity offers you the opportunity to pose your professionals many theoretical questions. One of the most common text question formats is the ‘ABCD’ type, which allows you to ask a question and provide between two to four possible answer options. Other text-type questions you can include in your gamified training are true or false exercises, where a professional must decide if a specific concept or statement is true or false.
Audiovisual questions, like text questions, serve to pose various theoretical questions. However, the difference here is that the exercise can be accompanied by audiovisual resources such as images, audios or videos. A good example of this type of question could include an initial statement of a concept, followed by a set of related audios or videos, and finally a series of questions covering the audiovisual content.
Image-based questions are gamified resources that present professionals with two or more images that they must use to answer a question. These exercises not only increase student engagement, but also improve content retention, since human beings tend to process visual information more efficiently than text. In fact, according to Forbes, 90% of the information processed by our brain is visual in nature.
This gamified activity consists of a question that the student must answer by selecting a specific part of an image as the correct option. There are two broad examples of this type of question: “user-assisted images”, which consist of interactive boxes representing possible answers, so that students can indicate with a click which is correct and which is not; and “images without user assistance”, which present a clean image without boxes, allowing users to mark the correct answer directly.
Free texts are activities that prompt the employee with a question about a specific concept or process, and then invite them to write a response in their own words. When evaluating this exercise, punctuation and spelling should be taken into account, as well as an accurate answer.
To ensure the success of gamification in the business world, especially in the field of training, it’s crucial to choose the right tools. Below, we share some of the most commonly used gamification tools:
One of the features that makes gamification so special and effective when used within an organization is that it actively involves employees, nurturing a sense of belonging and identity. In addition to this, there are multiple further benefits of gamification at work, some of which we share below:
Through elements such as challenges and rewards, gamification actively engages employees. It also allows you to create a fun and exciting environment that motivates employees to participate and push their limits, which increases commitment to the whole training process.
Additionally, an impressive 95% of employees enjoy using gamified systems, making gamification a highly powerful tool for increasing employee retention. The interactive and participatory approach of gamification captures the employee’s attention and, in turn, the recognition of achievements earned by moving through the training process fosters a more satisfying and stimulating work environment.
Look at it this way: what could be more motivating than knowing that your actions are going to be recognized or rewarded? Classifications and rankings make this sense possible by awarding merit to the individual or group effort of employees. Through these means, levels of commitment and motivation could increase by up to 48%.
Statistics show that 90% of employees are more productive when they take part in gamification. In addition, the immediate feedback offered by gamification dynamics allows employees to identify areas for improvement and make adjustments in real time, thereby continuously improving their performance.
On the other hand, gamification also reduces the stress associated with normally monotonous or repetitive tasks, by transforming learning into a rewarding interactive experience. When coupled with the sense of healthy competition stimulated by game elements, this drives employees to improve not only themselves but also their colleagues, creating a culture of constant improvement.
Gamification is a highly effective tool when it comes to encouraging teamwork and collaboration. By integrating game elements into the work environment, a playful atmosphere is encouraged that promotes healthy interaction between the members of a team. Shared challenges and objectives motivate employees to collaborate, communicate, and coordinate efforts to achieve common goals.
In addition, gamification allows you to design collaborative activities that require the joint participation of several team members, further strengthening cohesion and trust between them. Add to this the possibility of rewards for specific achievements, and the sense of belonging and satisfaction is reinforced by the shared effort of working together for a common goal.
The dynamics of gamification work because players constantly strive to improve themselves, and the way to encourage this is by seeking creative solutions that help them move forward, celebrate their achievements and obtain rewards. Additionally, these systems offer a safe space for employees to experiment and test new ideas. By recognizing and rewarding creativity and innovation, gamification incentivizes employees to keep looking for new ways to address challenges and improve processes.
Companies that opt to gamify training for their workers do so not only to strengthen their commitment to the organization, but also to maximize productivity, improve skills or develop their corporate culture. Get inspired by some of our training success stories, featuring real-life examples of gamification at work:
With over 1,000 points of sale in Spain, Clarel is a brand that specializes in beauty, personal care and wellbeing. Their goal was to transform their entire sales team into experts, with extensive knowledge of their product catalog and brand updates. How did they do it? With the help of isEazy and through agile, fun and flexible training, especially designed for their team.
So, thanks to gamification mechanics, Clarel has been able to effectively evaluate training results among its employees, achieving an engagement level of 84%, and a percentage of correct answers in tests and games that exceeded 90%. Find out more about this incredible success story.
With the help of isEazy, cosmetics firm Shiseido has achieved outstanding results by applying gamification to its training. Through the implementation of a social, gamified app, it has managed to increase the level of employee engagement with its training, and achieve a content retention rate of over 90%. In addition, it has been able to increase employee commitment by combining training and gamification through formats such as tutorial videos, challenges and games. You can learn more here about this amazing success story.
Bridgestone, a world-leading tire manufacturing company with a strong presence in over 25 countries, trusted isEazy to train its staff – distributed across more than 600 points of sale in Mexico, over 300 in Central America, and more than 200 in Colombia and Ecuador.
Through gamification dynamics, Bridgestone professionals discovered the opportunity to learn, share and comment on educational content, as well as play independently or with their colleagues to earn points that they could later exchange for prizes. The initiative exceeded expectations, gaining over 2,000 registered and active users in just four months. Learn more about this case!
Gamification is constantly evolving, and its use in companies is expected to grow exponentially over the coming years. Various trends are set to combine to create a future where gamification will become a fundamental tool for learning and professional development.
These trends include the integration of new technologies such as augmented and virtual reality, which will help to create immersive and engaging educational experiences. Artificial intelligence, for its part, will allow learning to be personalized for each user, adapting the content to their specific needs and individual pace.
Without a doubt, companies that adopt the innovative strategy of gamification will be better positioned to attract and retain talent, increase productivity and create a culture of continuous learning.
So, now you know all the benefits of gamification, how to use it in your training strategy, and even have some examples of gamification at work under your belt. Ready to maximize your own training results with gamification? Then try IsEazy Game, the perfect gamification app to get your professionals engaged and committed.
Transform your training into a fun and unique experience, brought to life with exciting social dynamics in a collaborative environment. Plus, turn your training content into interactive question-and-answer games – challenge your professionals and watch them climb through the rankings in a series of shared challenges to promote engagement and learning.
And the best part? You’ll gain a full overview of employee progress, as well as their level of knowledge, plus find out which content resonates best with each of them. A flexible, customizable and intuitive corporate gamification app. So what are you waiting for? Try isEazy Game today!
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