Increase employee engagement and performance through gamification

Gamification is a valuable tool. It intensifies engagement, performance, competitiveness and involvement of the participants. Using it for training can elevate the understanding of the content and impact outcomes that educators have come to expect.

In today’s enterprise, it’s common and in some case mandatory, for employees to go through training on a regular basis to enhance their skills. Employees need to retool or to acquaint themselves with new technologies or to comply with regulations or to adhere to new processes.

Whatever the purpose, the mechanism via which the training content is delivered is mostly universal, it is always a “Course”. A presentation authored as interactive sides, likely a quiz at the end of it. That a well structured format for delivering learning content, let’s be honest though, the content in most cases is simply ignored or clicked through and fails to get desired impact.

After working with several of our clients and partners we discovered the following:

70% of the employees did not engage in the training that was offered
Only 30% of the employees truly understood the training content
Less than 25% employees grasped the content to have a meaningful impact at work
Highly engaged employees were approximately 2.5 times more productive than less engaged employees
The traditional approach to training was disliked by over 95% of the participants and they categorized it as “boring”

The above observation unearthed the fact that the training content wasn’t bad, just the way it was presented was. After introduced learning gamification so employees could learn about topics or concepts in smaller chunks, at their own pace and yes, by playing games we saw a significant increase in employee engagement and understanding of the content.

A more playful, immersive, less stressful approach worked and without an iota of doubt it is efficient than training in structured course format. Making training content more engaging is a challenge and it can’t be fixed overnight. To learn how we did, click here.

In the future, over 70% of global companies will use gamification to boost engagement, retention, and achieve the desired impact with their learning content.

Originally published at blog.iworktech.com.