5 Gamification Tips to Improve New Hire Learning

Typically, new hire training means sitting through a series of PowerPoint presentations or online courses that offer nothing but company information. They are lengthy and time-consuming, and new hires hardly absorb any knowledge. As a result, they’re not ready for the job at the end of your training program.

On the other hand, when your training is game-based, it not only appeals to people of different ages but also becomes engaging, effective and even enjoyable. Games give meaning to experiences. They allow you to explore, think and try out new things.

So what is game-based learning and how can you apply it to your new hire training programs?

Game-based learning is a new way to impart learning and instructions in a fun and immersive manner. Games create a set of boundaries within a safe environment, to explore and try things out. They motivate you to succeed and minimize the fear of failure. Games provide the ideal environment to learn new things, with built-in permission to fail, and encourage out-of-the-box thinking.

New hire training programs familiarize new employees with your organization’s vision, mission, purpose, goals, culture, policies, processes, roles and responsibilities. As such, HR managers have to meticulously design their training programs to ensure that new hires smoothly transition into your organization and become productive within short time. Otherwise, it can slow down your organization’s growth.

By introducing game elements in a traditional learning environment, you can leverage the power of imagination and engagement in your new hire training programs. Game-based learning provides learners with a sense of accomplishment and gives them immediate feedback, making it easier to quickly improve their skills and strive hard to overcome challenges.

According to surveys and research, game-based learning is way more interesting to employees and results in higher engagement and better learning outcomes. Earning rewards, badges, and things like leveling up transform the monotonous training programs into something engaging, enjoyable, and effective. Such training programs enable new hires to absorb and recall a lot more knowledge and apply it readily to real-life scenarios at work.

Let’s look at a few ways to make your new-hire training interesting and engaging. There are several types of game techniques that you can use to educate your new employees about your company’s policies and procedure.

1. Elaboration

Whether you’re training about tools, processes or any other aspect of your organization, provide a brief background of how you built them in the first place and how it helps your customers. Provide additional resources such as detailed documents, audio-visuals and other media that will help add more context to your training.

This will not only make it easy for learners to understand why they need to absorb the given information but also why things are being done this way. It will also instill a sense of purpose in your learners, and motivate them to work harder.

2. Tell great stories

People love stories, or a narrative construction of facts. They stimulate imagination and make it easier to remember facts. This is a continuation of the elaboration technique, whereby you embed facts into the learner.

For example, instead of showing them a slideshow of how your organization started and bore them with stats and graphs, tell them a story of how your founders got the idea of starting your business, how they got their first customer and grew the business. To make things more interesting, show them a photo slideshow as you narrate the story. Also, pepper your story with interesting anecdotes and funny incidents.

You may have noticed that every video game has a storyline and an impressive opening video. Have you wondered why it’s needed in the first place?

3. Include Sorting

Another trick is to include sorting-based games in your new-hire training, whereby learners have to place content in the right slot to move to the next level. This type has various advantages.

First of all, it familiarizes learners with various parts of your organization. It also helps them understand organizational policies and procedures. For example, you can provide them with a bunch of documents and ask them to submit it to the right department. This will help them understand where to submit expense reports, give tax documents, get office supplies, make IT requests and more.

4. Use Matching Exercises

These type of games require learners to match images, ideas and situations with similar features. It’s a great way to teach the basics. If you wish to learn anything, you need to know the basic concepts related to it.

For example, in order to learn driving, you need to learn the road signs and traffic signals. Such games will make it easy for employees to understand their compensation and benefits. They’ll also learn what to do in various situations, such as, the various types of leaves available and which one to use when, what procedures to follow for each type of security threat.

5. Replayability

While slideshows and training videos offer one-time knowledge, games allow learners to replay the situation over and over again, making it easy to remember the facts, concepts and processes. In fact, you can even present similar content in a different context helping them apply what they’ve learnt in different situations.

Wrapping up

Game-based learning is an effective way to help new hires get more from your training programs, and quickly learn your company’s policies and procedures. It’s way better than answering quizzes or listening to long lectures. What’s more – your employees will be impressed by your training program and look forward to more of them in future.

About the author:

For more than 8 years, Sreeram Sreenivasan has worked with various Fortune 500 Companies in areas of Business Intelligence, Sales & Marketing Strategy. He’s the Founder of Ubiq BI, a cloud-based BI Platform for SMBs & Enterprises. He’s also the editor of Fedingo blog which covers a wide range of business growth topics.