Recognition

Best Practices in HR Management Recognition

By YU-KAI CHOU

Gamified Training in the Workplace: a Game Changer

Distractions are everywhere and, of course, workplaces are no exception. But companies now have a precious ally to foster employees’ engagement and emotional involvement in what they are doing thanks to the "games strategy", a key instrument in companies' hands.

The corporate workplace can be a harsh place. Often employees only do the bare minimum to survive through the dreadful week of deliverables and reports so they can finally enjoy the weekend. In most work environments, there is hardly any incentive for employees to work harder or learn new skills beyond what it takes to keep their paychecks. As a result, employees often only work hard enough to not lose their jobs. If you knew you could improve productivity just by making work more engaging and motivating, would you do it? Of course you would. What if I told you this would require your employees to “play” at work?

PLAYING IS LEARNING

Developing competence, or “learning” in other words, is one of three innate human needs (the others being autonomy and social relatedness). This “intrinsic motivation” for learning is what makes humans curious and want to develop new skills. However, conventional educational and training systems damage our intrinsic motivation to learn because of their overbearing need for common extrinsic motivators such as scores. This is where a gamified workplace can motivate employees to have fun while maximizing their learning and retention.

A “HUMAN-FOCUSED DESIGN”

Human-focused design focuses on optimizing for human motivations and feelings as opposed to “function-focused design” which optimizes for efficiency and output. Gamification is the best example of human-focused design because games was the first industry to master intrinsic motivation design. Games have no other purpose than to please the individual playing them. You have to do your taxes, go to work and finish your projects, but you never have to play a game. And so gamification takes the fun and engaging elements found in games and applies them to real-world productive activities to improve and optimize, among many other applications, education, engagement, and productivity in the workplace.

THE TRAINING CHALLENGE Many still believe that there is a lot of intrinsic motivation in current corporate training and education programs. However, if that were the case, employees would feel extremely excited about evaluations because they would be new opportunities to feel developed and accomplished! Unfortunately, that’s not the case. As mentioned above, the modern training challenge involves engaging employees, stimulating their interests, retaining their attention and maintaining a positive attitude in a nurturing environment. Key to these goals is the effort to develop a rich environment that encourages feedback and reinforcement, not only between the training environment and employees, but also between the employees themselves. These socially interactive mechanisms, with the proper

Games, precious allies in training programs.

By GABE ZICHERMANN

AN ENGAGEMENT CRISIS

Game mechanics, or gamification as experts like to call it, really help in creating engagement within employee training programs, for sure. This method has been used in training for hundreds of years. For example, the Girl Scouts and the US military have used badging, levels, challenges and rewards since their inception. As distractions continue to increase in our world (smartphones, social media and so on), it's harder to motivate and engage employees in the workforce. Because of this engagement crisis, we are now seeing some of the world's largest companies adopt gamification as a key employee engagement and HR strategy.

HOW THE "G" FACTOR WORKS

The key to engagement lies in 3Fs: (F)eedback, (F)riends and (F)un. Game-based learning is a powerful tool grounded in a powerful neurotransmitter− dopamine. A study conducted by Jesse Schell shows the human brain releases almost twice as much dopamine when a person is playing a video game compared to when that person is resting. Dopamine activates a sense of pleasure

KEYWORDS

➜ Gamification ➜ Human-focused design ➜ Applying engaging elements of games to the real world ➜ Encouraging feedback and enforcement between employees

level of control for encouragement and discipline, can be designed in effective ways to create “fun” learning situations.

GAMIFIED CORPORATE TRAINING: PRACTICAL EXAMPLES

One great example of gamified corporate training is done by Morf Media. Morf Media sets out to gamify various legal training activities for financial institutions. As imagined, this material is extremely dull, yet important. Adhering to the intrinsic motivations explained in the article, Morf Media created an immersive platform where the employee becomes a rising star in a simulated company by learning critical real-world information through interactive onboarding tutorials that utilize their creativity. It is this type of game-play that ensures employees accumulate competitive skills and stay engaged in the workplace.

GAME ON! If we successfully gamify education and training, then “assessments” will be seen as an exciting opportunity for employees to unlock new materials and skill-sets instead of just being a distraction from their work. Not only will training be more fun, engaging and interactive, it will also prepare our firms for a new economy where creativity and problem solving will become the competitive advantage over simple factual knowledge.•

KEYWORDS

➜ Game-based learning strategy ➜ Engagement and emotional involvement ➜ Sharing the overall goal ➜ Loyalty programs and behavioral economics

in the brain and a great deal of it is probably released, not only when a toddler receives a reward during a learning game but also when a teen is playing a video game or a business tycoon increases productivity, sales and profits utilizing game-based learning. The pleasure people feel in the process motivates them to seek more of the pleasurable activity. Gamification can also help to change employee attitude towards tasks that were previously considered boring through positive and frequent feedback, and lead to more fun in the workplace. People love playing games and games are an excellent and non-threatening way of drawing people in, even if they have to un-learn old methods and learn new ones.

SUCCESSFUL CASE STUDIES

Currently, one of the best employee engagement examples is Delta Airline's “Ready, Set, Jet!” system. The company managed to compress 4 years of training for its employees into 1 year by making it interesting and fun through a series of mini-games on geography, customer service, processes and the rest. Like Delta, top companies such as IBM and Deloitte have turned their entire employee training process into a series of games, which for Deloitte resulted in 50 percent higher employee engagement in their Deloitte Leadership Academy − an online training program for management/leaders. IBM, SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, Cisco and Microsoft have all engaged heavily in the subject of gamification of the enterprise. Most effort has been spent in gamifying training and development, recruitment and reviews.

SHARING THE GOAL

Creating a meaningful system that works in the long term requires far greater thought and intrinsic reward than classic games, teambuilding or social sharing. Nor can everything be gamified. While many environments would benefit from the application of appropriate engaging techniques, participation in a correctly gamified system is voluntary. If participants do not agree on the overall goal, the rewards and the evaluation principles, it will not motivate players. A good gamification solution has at its heart the aim to engage users with the best ideas from games, loyalty programs and behavioral economics. Because gamification is about the process, there is the need to develop an industry workshop that helps companies to learn the skills for designing the game mechanics. One of the most important events about gamification workshops is the annual GSummit conference, which will take place in San Francisco on June 10-13.