3 Easy Ways To Use Gamification In Your Employee Onboarding Process

It is found that 31% of employees have quit the company within their first six months. Of these, a large chunk of employees alludes to the lack of fun at work and training sessions. Gamification as an onboarding strategy serves two main goals that are to make training fun and to accelerate the pace of learning.

Why Use Gamification for Onboarding?

Gamification is essentially the use of concepts which is widespread in traditional video games to motivate and boost users’ encouragement to perform certain tasks. In employee training, reward points and badges motivate the user to learn and complete the course. The rewards and badges are not only the elements of gamification but also a well-designed game that has other elements like goals and clearly-marked paths to drive the player in a direction that the game wants them to take. Therefore, such elements are also used for designing courses or learning materials since it is possible for the learner to get distracted during the process. Onboarding programs that use multimedia as part of the training process too, contribute towards better focus and do not take the learner’s mind away from the actual process.

There are some collected three easy ways to integrate little fun and games into the onboarding process below!

• Leveling Up

One of the first things an organization should do while bringing a new employee on board is to set actionable goals for them to achieve in order to get started on their real job. Goal setting is the HR version of ‘leveling up’ where a player is required to accomplish a certain number of tasks before they are promoted to the next level. The use of LMS in an organization takes care of the training process and then establishes specific goals within your learning package.

Goal setting can be both active and passive from a gamification perspective. Active goal-setting techniques make use of assessments to clarify and check if the employee being onboarded has truly breached their goals or not. Passive goal-setting techniques make use of checklists to notify players or users of the goals they have reached. This is useful for onboarding sessions that may be revisited later.

• Leaderboards

Leaderboards are the list that brings out the top-performing players which is one of the most effective gaming strategies to motivate players to keep playing. Studies have found that introducing leaderboards in gamification increases the level of competition between players. Leaderboards, when involved in employee onboarding, can motivate learners to improve their learning efficiency and be productive in order to secure a rank in the leaderboard.

To integrate leaderboards into your onboarding program, it is very necessary to objectively state the specific criteria that will go into assessing performance.

• Rewards & Incentives

It may be too early to give rewards to newly hired employees with financial incentives for their performance during the onboarding sessions. But it is said that human beings derive motivation from rewards regardless of their form. For your onboarding programs, an organization can have a wide variety of rewards programs. A common intention is to offer certificates at the completion of the onboarding program. Also, an organization can invest in giving cool badges to its employees for completing assessments and completing tasks that are part of the onboarding program.

Beyond Onboarding

Although gamification is a powerful tool to improve employee onboarding it is also important to note that the strategy is equally applicable to all kinds of training in the workplace. Technologies will change all the time which makes it important for organizations to upgrade the skills of their employees. With gamification, it is not only possible to make this onboarding process fun, but also more highly efficient.