Gamification within the workplace is incorporating gaming elements to boost business operations. In 2024, most businesses agree that e-learning programs with gamification and microlearning are more efficient and impactful for performance than a traditional corporate approach to employee training. What does gamification do and how can it help you improve overall performance in your company?
1# Retain Employee Talent
In modern times, companies are struggling to retain employees. The average tenure of employees in the US is 4.1 years. The Work Institute’s report on retention in 2024 says the top reasons for employees leaving the company are troubles with career; health and family; and unsatisfactory work-life balance. Troubles with career meant not enough opportunities to grow, lack of achievements, and security within the company.
Gamification is one of the tools that make learning and development software (L&D) so engaging and performance-driven: it simplifies the process via interactivity, makes learning collaborative, sometimes competitive, and interesting. Giving people a chance to learn how to do something that matters to them engages them, and engaged employees don’t quit. They see themself as a part of a bigger process: growing a company, contributing to a business, learning to do more to achieve more.
2# Motivate and Engage Employees
There is no perfect job. Even the best companies have moments when employee motivation is low. Lack of motivation — if that’s not the case of a person not wanting anything to do with the company — is often caused by lack of engagement; by work being tedious and repetitive; by not understanding the value of one’s work. That impacts performance and hurts business.
Gamification in L&D solutions allows businesses to build an environment that will unite employees and bring them closer. In that environment, with the right analytical algorithms running in the background, they will be able to see how their new skills impacted the company. How they fact they were able to help the client with their new skill changed the dynamic of the partnership. Finally, they’ll see results of their efforts in numbers on a leaderboard — and perhaps even engage in a competition with their co-workers. About 80% of employees say they’re more motivated to learn and apply what they’ve learned when their training is gamified.
Solutions for corporate learning aren’t a must-have element for introducing gamification, though. Sometimes, companies incorporate gamification elements in their project management, so employees would feel motivated to work harder, finish their tasks earlier, etc. to win in the between-employees contest and earn more badges. Here, make sure to be cautious approaching gamification as a “fix-it” for poor performance, though: sure, a fun rivalry can give you a short-term increase in performance—but, as with most video games, it can get boring. Remember that being motivated to win isn’t the same as being motivated to do a good job.
3# Lead Online Training For Employees
Every company trains its employees: the more new skills they learn, the better they’ll be at their jobs. But simply signing them up for a course is often not efficient. Lectures are long and often take up employees’ time that could have been spent working. The course is also frequently theory only, with no practical application to their current scope of responsibilities.
There are plenty of gamification apps that help better train employees, and you can build one too. Some of them you can find on Diversido. Choose the one that offers a practical, interactive, hands-on approach to learning the most sophisticated materials — and employees often have assignments to use the new skill or apply the new information to their day job right away. Practice helps to retain memories better.
4# Encourage the Employees
Performance-based badges — like “Learner”, “Smart”, “Expert”, and “Top Performer” — play another important part in training: it signifies an achievement — and people love achieving things a lot; it makes employees compete. Competition, as it’s already been said, can give a good push to learners’ performance stats. Through the introduction of a rewards system, employees will be more encouraged to do a better job.
5# Strengthen Company Brand
Gamification can help by raising employee awareness about what companies’ business goals are and the ways they are contributing to them. Through interactive games, managers can relay the history of the company, the responsibilities assigned to employees in different departments, and the structure of the business processes.
Many employees lose motivation because they don’t know how the things they’re doing at work help the business achieve its goals. Use gamification to show them that. Access to a community where everyone learns and everyones’ moving towards the same objective also fosters a feeling of belonging, so important for employee brand.
Let the Game Start
Employees leaving is costly for businesses. According to Investopedia, companies spend more than $4,000 to hire, onboard, and train one person — with high turnover rates, which causes significant losses.
One of the ways companies can deal with that and retail their workforce is to provide them with opportunities for growth and knowledge they seek. One of the methods to do it is by establishing learning and development initiatives in the company — and enhancing them with gamification.
The important thing to remember about gamification and e-learning software, in general, is that they won’t give you the result you want if learning materials aren’t created and curated specifically for an interactive environment and fast-paced, in-the-middle-of-a-work-day learning. Gamification — notifications about someone taking a user’s place in the leaderboard or alerts signaling that a user missed a day — shouldn’t distract a person from their job and shouldn’t give them more anxiety. Latter is fun and competitive only at the beginning — the nervousness of a low-stakes threat, the joy of avoiding it; after that, the fear of failure can significantly demotivate employees.
Build your gamified learning with care about how it can integrate into your employees’ life, how it can help not only increase the performance on the project — or efficiency of learning — but improve the way your workforce feel about their job and their place within your business.
