Corporate trainings – mandatory safety instructions, classes on new software, or onboarding courses –  are often where creativity and fun come to die. Dropout rates are particularly high in online trainings.

Gamification holds the key to increasing employee motivation and course completion. Find out how gamifying and individualising your courses turns boring trainings into exciting learning adventures.

How Can Gamification Enhance Corporate Trainings?

Does that sound familiar? You really want to deliver a fun workshop for your employees that ensures the key takeaways are etched into their memory. But anytime you open the material, you die a little inside. It’s dull, dry, and you have no idea how to get people excited about it.

In the last few years, we all have spent more time in front of our screens, in Zoom meetings, and in online classes than ever before. If companies want to motivate their employees to sit through yet another online training, they have to ensure that participants are engaged.

Too often corporate trainings employ a one-size-fits-all mentality. Watch this video on our accounting system. Read this document to learn about our new strategy. Here is a PDF with our organisational structure.

By gamifying content, instructors and admins increase course completion rates, knowledge retention, and employee motivation.

Over the past decade, gamification has become a popular tool for businesses to engage and motivate employees. As a strategy to make learning more effective, gamification is here to stay. In 2021, the global gamification market size was estimated at USD 10.5 billion. By 2030, this number is expected to reach USD 96.8 billion.

Experts estimate that around 70% of Global 2000 companies (the world’s largest 2,000 companies) use gamification. With good reason. Whether it is engaging customers or employees through gamification, companies that implement gamification strategies are seven times more profitable than those that don’t.

When businesses incorporate elements of game-playing into the workplace, they can make work more fun and engaging, while also helping employees develop skills and improve performance.

What Does Gamification in Corporate Trainings Look Like?

Gamification is not supposed to turn work into a game nor is it only suitable for easily digestible information.

Rather, gamification is the process of incorporating tried and tested game mechanics into non-game contexts to drive engagement and excitement. In other words, it’s making things fun by adding a competitive or collaborative element.

There are several ways to gamify the workplace, but some common methods include:

• adding points, badges, and leaderboards to encourage friendly competition,
• setting goals and challenges to promote productivity,
• offering rewards for meeting targets or completing tasks.

Gamification can be used to increase sales, improve customer service, or boost employee morale. When implemented effectively, the strategy has a positive impact on both individual employees and the overall business.

How Can You Use Gamification for Corporate Trainings?

1. Gamify Onboarding Sessions

The onboarding process is crucial in retaining new talent. A study of 1000 employees in the United States found that almost 65% of new hires consider leaving their job after a negative onboarding experience. And although more workers return to the office after the pandemic, the shift to hybrid working means online onboarding is here to stay.

Information overload, long, boring PDF files, and unclear expectations can make the onboarding process tedious and risk employee retention.

Consider using gamification strategies such as microlearning – dividing materials into achievable units – to help new employees familiarise themselves with you.

2. Ensure That Employees Retain Boring but Important Information

Sometimes corporate trainings have to deliver essential but dry information. Maybe you need your employees to know about a new way to hand in invoices, new compliance rules, or a difficult-to-understand but crucial new software.

If you deliver your online trainings in a traditional way, you can expect high dropout rates and low knowledge retention.

By making these trainings more engaging, for example, by surprising learners with unexpected rewards or creating team learning opportunities, you can increase the completion rates of your courses and ensure that crucial information is delivered.

3. Increase Teamwork

Remote work can make team formation and successful teamwork more difficult. Employees miss out on “watercooler moments” to bond.

Gamified corporate trainings present an additional opportunity for colleagues to get to know and engage with each other. By including gamification elements such as leaderboards in training courses, you can build new teams and strengthen existing ones.

Gamifying trainings increase skill retention by 40%. Higher knowledge transfer, improved engagement and productivity, and better team cohesion are just a few of the benefits of adding gamification to your corporate trainings.

Individualise Learning and Increase Course Completion with Level Up Drops

Individualisation is the key to successful learning. Level Up Drops are key to creating an individualised learning environment.

One of the most effective gamification strategies is having users collect experience points. Think of role-play games where your character gathers gold coins for completing tasks or defeating enemies. While there are most likely no dragons to slay or wizards to defeat in corporate trainings, you can still use experience points to motivate your learners.

Level Up XP+ allows you to include so-called Drops into your Moodle trainings. Instructors can generate a set of individual rules for their courses and determine for which actions learners earn experience points.

Instructors then place Drops at any point in the training. When students encounter a Drop they earn points.

Drops can be placed anywhere and students can earn points for many different types of activities. Thus, instructors can use Drops to provide each participant with an individualised learning path, motivate them, and reinforce desired behaviour.

Four Ways Drops Allow You to Individualise Your Courses

Decide how many points participants earn for different tasks.

Let’s say every employee has to go through new compliance training. You can decide that if they have finished a particularly difficult aspect of the training, they earn higher points than for completing easier tasks.

Motivate learners to go the extra mile.

You know from past trainings that people usually don’t fill out the survey at the end. With Level Up’s plugins, you can assign Drops for filling out the survey and even give extra points to those who wrote long-form answers.

Give more support where needed.

Take quizzes as an example. You included them in your course to check whether participants understood the material. Instead of giving all learners the same points for the same action, you can determine that, for instance, people with lower quiz scores receive additional points if they review the material again.

Support social learning.

Meaningful engagement and peer-to-peer learning increase learning outcomes and participant satisfaction. However, most social interactions in online courses require incentives. By adding Drops, and therefore awarding points, to actions such as leaving a question for the other participants, replying to queries, or even forming a group to finish a project, you can encourage team learning and social cohesion.

A leaderboard visualises the collected points. Use leaderboards to:

• create friendly competition between employees,
• facilitate teamwork,
• tie points to real-life rewards such as free lunch or even an additional vacation day.

Currently, Level Up uses Drops in our XP Moodle Plugin to increase engagement and completion rates.

Use Gamification to Learn About Your Learners

If your training participants collect points while they move through the course, they not only increase their chances of success but also create a wealth of data for you. You can use this data to devise more effective trainings in the future.

Strategically placed Drops allow you to see which material or part of your course was particularly engaging, where people dropped out and what motivated them to come back. You can provide more targeted support by understanding how your employees perform in your trainings.

You also learn more about your employees as they pass through the course. Depending on how you set up your Drops, you can identify participants with higher points as experts and use them to guide other learners along.

Conclusion

Gamifying corporate trainings help businesses to improve their ROI by:

• increasing engagement and retention rates,
• reducing training costs,
• increasing employee morale.

Use gamification elements strategically to create the best possible outcome. By individualising learning pathways, for example, through using Level Up’s Drops, you can increase employee motivation, information retention, and overall satisfaction.