Ways to Add Gamification to the LMS for Employee Training and Development

5 Tips to Make It Easy to Incorporate Gamification into Your Employee Training LMS

Apart from idioms and rhymes, we do not hear the concepts of work and play together much. However, recently, the concept of gamification in corporate education has started to be mentioned frequently. Adding gamification elements to your L&D strategy doesn't mean giving employees joysticks and playing games, of course. Develop and encourage employees rather than games. Badges, icons, leaderboards and colorful quizzes are considered gamification. Let's take a closer look at a few practice tactics of using gamification for employee training and development.

1. Find Out What Motivates Your Employees

Do you want your employees to be interested in and participate in their training? So you have to find out what motivates them. In this way, you can personalize the rewards at the end of the training and encourage everyone to participate in the training. Do they like skill-based badges or level indicators? Do they prefer to use the points they get from the trainings in physical products, or use them for a few days off? Maybe park their cars in the executive car park? Or they may prefer activities such as one-on-one lunches with the boss, networking with senior management. You can use anonymous surveys to see which options are popular. Use this data to design the right game mechanics and reward system. When choosing mechanics, you should also consider the personality traits and preferences of the employees. For example, some introverts may not like applications such as the LMS leaderboard that puts the competition in the foreground.

2. Adjust Rewards Based on Business Results/Goals

It's easy to score points like the person with the highest number of sales or the person with the best participation. However, if the metrics are more closely related to business goals, you may benefit more from training. Social skills lay a good foundation for this. Let's say you aim to develop more empathetic listeners. You can use surveys to measure satisfaction levels after training. Have the client use listening skills when interacting with a trained staff member. After the call, you can improve the customer experience with a few questions that measure whether the customer's wishes are well understood and feel valued. They can evaluate how well the customer representative evaluates the issues and whether the issue has been resolved. All of this comes from your staff's ability to understand and deal with customer issues.

3. Make Your Corporate Training Live Events Interactive

Teleconferencing is often used to host meetings and attend webinars. Teleconferencing is generally a passive tool. Users can sometimes ask questions, but mostly they prefer to sit back and listen to the conference. To change this, turn digital courses into platforms where an interactive environment between users is possible instead of a platform with continuous lessons. Have all users play an active role. For example, you can give them common tasks to solve together. You can use a web conferencing tool with detailed statistics for such interactions. You can calculate engagement levels by percentage and rate users accordingly. If they know this beforehand, they will try harder to be active.

4. Add Some Fun with Short Quizzes

Non-classical, interesting quizzes are usually fun. That's why you might consider making them part of your training strategy. In this way, you can also improve your employees' observation skills. For example, show employees a short video of a sales representative introducing a product to a customer. Then ask the employees questions such as what the sales rep did right/wrong and which product they think is more suitable for the customer. Keep these types of quizzes light and fun, but blend them with some important content to make sure users are really learning.

5. Integrate Badges with Development Processes

Earning a certification, completing a demanding course, or significantly improving task performance are advancements that make employees happy. Give your employees badges when they achieve important goals to justify their hard work. If you want badges to be more effective, you can make them customizable and offer your employees the opportunity to have badges in any design they want.

Conclusion

Gamification, if done right, can be a useful educational tool at all stages of working life. If it is not done correctly, it will be seen as childish and will not be accepted. Ask your employees what will motivate them best. Link your rewards to training goals and encourage your employees to engage more during digital training. Let them earn points while solving interesting quizzes with pleasure. Reward key achievements with personalized badges.