Banking on Gamification for Better Onboarding

‘At one go we have to manage the onboarding of around 40,000 remote employees’, said the voice on the other side of the call and our team went quite for a moment. ‘Onboarding would mean training and tracking them at least for three months till they have completed all their certification and are ready to speak to the customers. Banking is very stringent with its certification of sales employees and we can’t let even one of them miss that out.’

We knew at that moment that it was time to put our thinking caps on to figure out how to make the onboarding process of this diverse, remote, multi-lingual workforce effectively and efficiently. The first and obvious option was to deploy a multi-lingual mobile-based Learning Management System which was integrated to our client’s HRMS. But the challenge did not end there. Even after implementing vILT sessions, our client often complained about employees who are either confused, preoccupied, demotivated or all the above – resulting in an unsuccessful session which has serious business impact.

Here we needed to understand the nature of the workforce joining our client. These were young people, fresh out of college with a fickle mind who had to go through 3 months of rigorous training and their performance had to be tracked throughout to hand them over to the sales head.

Broadly, there were two challenge areas –

• Regular updates and performance tracking
• Keeping the workforce engaged
  
  

Good news was that in our experience with a host of banking clients, these challenges are easily solved with well-administered gamification strategies through your LMS. While the basic principle of gamification – ‘input-reward-repeat’ is only a part of it, here are all the benefits of gamification of your onboarding and subsequent training process.

Collect Data on Performance

Rewarding employees with points for joining and participating in the online training sessions is an obvious trick. The next step is to create levels of a game during each session which the employee has to complete to get to the next level. This helps you to track the performance of an individual on a daily basis. Be it completing a regulatory certification or completing the training session on a digital tool for customer service, you can keep a track of the learner’s performance. This not only helps you understand the trends in the batch’s performance but identify the leaders and also the underdogs.

Creating a Thread of Actions

Three months is a long time to keep your focus and the duration of the preliminary training process varies from company to company. Even if your new joinees are logging in daily, there will be a sense of impermanence if their daily activities are not threaded together. With a multi-level game-based approach, you can achieve a continuance in your daily meet. It creates motivation for the employee to pull up their socks for the next day, even if they have lagged behind today.

Micro-learning Through Games

Microlearning works. Gamification also works. Combining the two works like magic. Imagine trying to deliver product training to a group of remote work force through a week-long induction program. You have a recipe for failure. While if you choose to deliver the same product training in small nuggets in each session, with an immediate assessment model in form of a quiz game – the retention of knowledge will definitely be higher. This also serves as a perfect point-of-sale assist for your sales team who will be now fighting the virtual sales challenge where the digital-savvy, informed customer has higher number of queries.

Achieving Team Spirit

A significant part of the apathy employees experience towards virtual meets stems from the social isolation of the virtual set up. Social learning which accounts for almost 70% of any organization learning is also lost completely. As design consultant and LinkedIn contributor, Tom Jepson says – that to build true engagement, people often need to feel like they are contributing to something bigger than themselves; a ‘greater good’ or commons. Achieve this by creating a journey for your team so that when they show up for their next session, it is not just a regular ‘work thing’ but an adventure that needs a group of people focusing on a goal bigger than their own immediate network, a set of constraints, and a story to follow.

To keep things in perspective here’s a trivia you might like. Google achieved 100% employee compliance after implementing a gamified travel expense system. That tells us quite a bit about what a well-executed gamification strategy can achieve, right? In an uncertain regulatory environment, it is very important have your teams on their toes and in a remote environment that challenge can be fixed with a little bit of ‘fun and games’!

We at GCube have 20+ years of experience and 80+ industry awards in the learning technologies domain and we are keen on finding solutions to the challenges in the industry. Let us know if you have any query, thoughts or suggestions for us to delve deeper on.