Gamification in E-learning: Motivating Your Workforce to Learn More and Perform Better

From being a just buzz to a widely popular corporate training strategy, gamification is effective in catering to bespoke training needs. The highlight of gamification is a reward mechanism to motivate the learners to finish their tasks and compete with their peers. Different kinds of rewards include badges, points, filling of a progress bar, and leaderboards are some of the effective ways of encouraging learner engagement and overall knowledge retention. Certainly, gamification within a corporate environment can help to reshape the entire training landscape by motivating employees through rewards and recognition.

Most industries are adopting gamification approach to engage their workforce with the training content and impart a fun-filled learning experience. For instance, organizations follow the gamification approach to train their sales employees on different products and services. During this process, learners are rewarded with badges and scores to indicate that they are performing well. Consequently, gamification boosts the confidence of learners in selling products, thereby improving customer satisfaction and overall business sales.

When L&D teams, trainers, and even learners look for some practical ways to boost learner interactivity, then gamification proves to be an ideal choice. Games motivate the learners to participate and get instant feedback as per their performances. They create a realistic context in which learners can perform tasks and accomplish their goals. There are several opportunities to blend the traditional classroom-based approach with e-learning gamification successfully. These include:

Modern Salesforce Training

Gamification in e-learning aids to deliver impactful employee training, particularly in areas such as sales, marketing, compliance, and more. Today, training the workforce in sales and marketing departments are witnessing a massive uptake in e-learning gamification due to a plethora of reasons:

• The sales employees are highly competitive and want to remain ahead of the curve. They prefer a game-based training approach to analyze their knowledge and overall progress by earning scores, points, badges, and other rewards.
• They also interact at higher levels, considering that their managers and trainers have access to updated leaderboards reflecting individual scores.
• The game-based e-learning approach helps the sales employees to acquire optimal knowledge of new products, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and improved sales.

Customer training/ Product and Services training

Organizations adopt gamification as a critical customer training strategy to impart updated information about their products to the intended audiences. They support the delivery of relevant training content to fulfill the pertinent needs of globally dispersed customers.

• Gamification in e-learning helps customers to attain knowledge on a specific product and share information with other participants in the game.
• Based on knowledge acquisition and the level of interactivity achieved through comments and posts, learners get points and badges on completion of each degree.
• The earned rewards enable the learners to acquire the ‘expert’ status so that others can seek help from them to perform better.
• The game-based learning events can be open to the public or only to those who attended the event- product launch, trade show, and more.
• Gamification follows a structured approach to how learners acquire product information and measure an individual’s knowledge level. Incorporation of games in e-learning makes the training experience more engaging and entertaining, thereby motivating the learners to participate, compete with their peers, and succeed.

Employee Onboarding

The gamification approach is widely popular for new-hire training and employee onboarding process. The conventional instructor-led approach to delivering onboarding sessions through lectures and videos is a bit tedious. Therefore, organizations incorporate gamification strategy to drive optimal employee engagement, knowledge retention and make the new hires productive enough in the new work environment.

• On successful completion of each level, scores are highlighted on automated leaderboards to indicate every learner’s progress during the game.
• Games create different scenarios where learners collaborate with their peers, and actively play to win the game.
• Badges and lifelines help to reinforce the overall learning experience as the results of gamification cater to the tailored learning needs of new hires.

Overall, gamification is the key driving factor to boost the overall learning uptake. Workplace learning embeds videos, quizzes, and scenario-based questions to engage maximum learners. Human beings retain only 10% of what they hear and 20% of what they see. They recall 30% more knowledge when the training content embeds audios and visuals. Also, when learners participate in learning games, they retain around 90% information. Modern workforce learns more quickly and recalls information through game-based content, rather than boring lectures. The gamification approach in e-learning acts as a useful tool for employees to learn and perform. Customer training, sales training programs, new-hire training, and similar activities require a high level of participation and fun. Therefore, incorporating different elements of gamification make the overall process challenging as well as rewarding at the same time.

Gamification is the common buzzword among the organizations to deliver a learning experience full of fun and excitement. The concept of gamification in corporate training is now widely accepted as a viable solution for improved levels of engagement, collaboration, and knowledge retention. It is all about playing, challenging, and competing with the peers-and applying relevant skills to real-life workplace situations. A majority of e-learning organizations are thinking differently on how to engage the new-age employees and G-Cube is one of them. With more and more organizations demanding for a game-based approach for their workforce training programs, our focus is also evolving towards incorporating games with e-learning solutions. In today’s digital era, where time and resources are becoming valuable, businesses are moving towards activities that are motivating, rewarding, and filled with opportunities to grow and succeed. To know more, you can write to us at in**@gc**********.net.

Suggested Further Reading:
Game-enabled Learning: Drive Engagement, fortify retention and accelerate competency