Many professionals, maybe the majority, when they receive an email with information about a new corporate training program think: ‘Ugh, not this’. They read the words ‘corporate training’ and immediately think: ‘snoozefest’.
And, let’s admit it; sometimes it can seem like a waste of time: ‘On top of all the work I have to get through, now I have to do this too?’ or even ‘They don’t pay me to waste my time on -insert training topic here-’.
If you’re involved in corporate training, you probably know how difficult it can be to connect with teams and engage them with your training.
I’m here to tell you that your training can be much more fun, motivating, and productive. How? With gamification for companies, a strategy that’s rapidly growing in popularity.
Gamification not only improves training results, but it also boosts talent retention and offers real-time metrics on the performance of your training content. Let me tell you how!!
Gamification in companies: What’s it all about?
Gamification consists of applying game dynamics in non-game contexts to exploit the enormous motivational power of games. The idea is to take advantage of the emotions we feel when we play to achieve objectives that go beyond entertainment.
Our brain is stimulated by rewards, recognition, and the idea of competition. That is why many companies create gamified systems to incentivize sales, in addition to using gamification in customer loyalty programs and in many other marketing actions.
Never underestimate the power of the game! Take Pokémon, for example. This game caused millions of people who otherwise would not have left the couch to travel miles in the hunt for these little virtual creatures.
Everyone likes to play games, so why not take advantage of this in your training? Science shows that gamification enhances learning of any kind, in any environment. And this includes, of course, corporate training. The motivation of gamification improves attention, concentration, and content retention.
Now everything is online
Although gamification has been used since ancient times, the emergence of the term is quite recent and is related to new technologies. In fact, the term was coined in 2002.
With technological advances there are a lot of tools that multiply the possibilities of gamification and its use is spreading. Designing online resources for gamification is much easier and more scalable than planning activities of this type in the offline world, since you can reach more people with the same cost.
Laura López, Internal Communications Technician at Redeia (parent company of Red Eléctrica de España), uses Genially to create gamification resources. She tells us:
‘With these types of resources we can make publications more attractive and people retain the information better’.
She tells us that in addition to increasing the number of visits, it attracts more attention: ‘It’s a way of conveying messages that we want to get across to the workforce, such as the company’s values or the group’s commitment to specific items: occupational risk prevention, sustainability, diversity, or equality’.
Creating gamified resources is easier than you think
Genially makes this job much easier for you, as it makes crafting interesting storytelling very simple. By accessing the tool you will find a lot of resources to illustrate and structure it in the fastest and easiest way possible.
In the video below, from minute 1.35 Elizabeth Martinez from AON tells us how they use Genially to make gamified training.
You don’t need programming skills to add interactivity or animation effects to your creations, both very powerful features for creating gamified resources.
Thanks to interactivity, learners go from reading content to being able to interact with it. Their passive spectator role changes to an active role; they have to do things, take action. And this, as we know, reinforces learning in a very powerful way.
In Genially you’ll find templates for creating all kinds of games, quizzes, and escape rooms. They’re designed to make it really easy to add your content, and already include interactivity and animation effects, so in a few minutes you can create super visual materials for your training.
The templates are 100% editable; you can create any kind of gamification you can think of. For example, the ‘choose your own adventure’ or branching scenario format usually works really well.
Check out this example. Do you accept the challenge?
What’s more, Genially can be integrated with Moodle or any of the most popular learning management platforms (LMS). This means that resources created with Genially can be used in online, in-person, or blended learning environments. And you can also download your geniallys in SCORM format to track the performance of your training from your LMS.
Benefits of using gamification in corporate training
Companies use gamification to provide training on company culture, policies, products, and processes, both during the onboarding of new recruits and for existing teams. Gamification allows you to simulate real situations to put what employees have learned into practice and also improve information retention.
Did you know that good onboarding boosts employee retention by up to 3 years in 69% of cases? So it’s really worth the effort of making onboarding fun and engaging from the start.
Going beyond onboarding, gamification helps to improve:
- Communication and collaboration between individuals and teams
- Time management
- Motivation
- Attitudes towards the business project
This translates into better customer service, fewer errors, improved company reputation, and greater productivity and efficiency. Are you convinced? Then let’s get to work!
How to use gamification in your training
- Set objectives: Define the main objective and secondary objectives of the training. Is it theoretical training or do you need to enhance teamwork? Having these objectives in sight from the beginning will help you choose the most appropriate tools and dynamics.
- Decide on the gamification style: You can use quizzes before the training to find out the level of prior knowledge on a topic, or afterward to reinforce knowledge and see how the training performed. Escape rooms allow you to set up individual or team dynamics, and are engaging and exciting. The simulations or scenarios help the teams to think about certain situations in the first person. Organizing competitions can awaken a certain healthy competitiveness.
Bear in mind that succeeding with gamification involves developing a complete system that combines different game mechanics: points, rewards, feedback, levels, and performance rankings will keep teams motivated.
According to Laura López, at Redeia they try to adapt common games to the digital environment, always trying to create a ‘friendly’ environment.
‘It is important to carry out some research in order to choose the most appropriate kind of gamification, which allows you to achieve a balance between form and substance’.
- Choose your resources: What will the theme of your materials be? Create a suitable story that caters to the tastes of your audience, with a matching aesthetic.
- It’s playtime! The only way to know if your gamification works well is to test it. Ask teams for feedback so you can improve your resources in future iterations.
- Analyze the results of your training. Genially provides statistics on audience interaction with the content, allowing you to collect all kinds of metrics. And, uploading a Genially in SCORM format to your LMS makes it possible to monitor the performance of your learners in a very specific way, and to collect valuable information for evaluation. Specifically, you can know who accesses the content, the percentage of the genially they visit, how long they spend in it, and even assign scores to pages of the genially.
Free gamification templates for corporate training
So now if you’re thinking ‘This gamification thing sounds like a great idea but where am I going to find the time…?’, don’t fret! Here are a couple of templates to get you started creating your own resources. Choose the one you like best and start creating.
Say adiós to boring training! If you follow these steps, you can gamify your training and connect with teams like never before. Oh, what’s that? You already use Genially to create gamified training? Leave a comment below to share your experience with the community and show everyone how great your content is!
2 Responses
Hi Natalia – I recently discovered genially and was super impressed by the variety of games. However have some doubts in terms of
1) if the metrics for games played by player are tracked at backend and are available in form of report.
2) Also it also does not seem to allow player to proceed and gives them multiple tries till they get the answer right. Is this a configuration that is possible to change?
Hi Kartic V,
If you use an LMS, you can download your geniallys in SCORM format, upload them to your LMS, and obtain all the info about the way people are interacting with your content: if they access it, the percentage of the content they view, or the score they get. You’ll find all the information you need in this post.
With regard to what happens when someone answers a question, you can set this up however you prefer. Some templates like this one are set up so that it’s not possible to move on until you get the answer right.
Other templates, like this one for example, allow you to move on to the next question whether you give the correct answer or not. Have a look at how to interactivity is set up in each case and use it in the way that suits you best.
And keep creating awesome content! 🚀