5 Benefits of Gamified Training

Who doesn’t love playing games? Games can help us understand concepts and new lessons in a fun way. Gamifying employee development is a relatively new concept for businesses. Check out the list below for some proven benefits of reimagining a more exciting employee development program. 

Gamification can be used as a term in two different ways. First, it can mean adopting the act of playing a video game into everyday use. Video games possess engagement levels and entertainment values that help motivate us to accomplish certain tasks normally seen as boring, like learning. Secondly, gamification can refer to the act of using game elements in non-games to make things more enjoyable or interesting. 

1Huddle combines the two to provide you with comprehensive training games to level up and fire up your workplace. Although there are many benefits to introducing gamification into your employee training efforts, here are the five most compelling benefits of gamification:

1. Cut onboarding in half. Reduce onboarding costs.

Gamified training software makes training more fun and enjoyable. This will motivate new employees to complete their onboarding training quicker compared to more traditional methods where retention and interest is diminished. 

2. Increase employee engagement.

In more conventional methods of training, like using a sales trainer, employees sit through lectures and take a test at the end of their sessions, leaving little to no room for communication, feedback or engagement during the process. 

By using games in training, employees are given immediate feedback on how they did as they progress through the training modules. Ongoing feedback is incredibly helpful because employees can use it to keep themselves engaged and make adjustments as their training progresses. They can take this feedback to make improvements and keep employees engaged. 

Games help create a sense of community within your team, something that traditional training methods completely lack. Instead of sitting in front of a screen or attending a lecture, gamification gets employees to respond to situations in real-time, keeping them engaged and allowing them to foster a deeper level of knowledge.

In addition, gamification makes learning more fun. Training is often viewed in a negative light, because the process is typically a boring one and the employees feel as if they aren’t gaining anything by being there. By using games, training doesn’t feel like training so your employees will be more engaged and actually want to participate instead of feeling like they are forced to.

3. Drive more sales.

Rather than focus on the daily grind of individual performance, gamification allows your team to work together on specific objectives that help drive revenue. Gamification can help your employees focus on the bigger picture and on larger business objectives. A sense of teamwork and accomplishment can motivate your sales team to bigger and better metrics. 

4. Reduce employee turnover.

Studies show that the average replacement costs of a salaried employee is typically six to nine months’ salary. For an employee earning $60,000 per year, it would total approximately $30,000 to $45,000 in recruiting and training costs.

Highly trained and engaged employees rarely bounce around from job to job. High turnover rates are a huge problem many businesses face today. As the need for committed employees grows with the economy, gamification can help increase retention because of the reasons mentioned above. It is fun and engaging while also intertwining aspects of collaboration and meaningful work from each individual employee. When your employees feel as if the work they are doing is making a difference, they will continue to stay and grow with your company. 

5. Increase HR efficiency. 

Gamification can be as automated a process as you want. It can give us real-time data to help us make key real-time decisions. Gamification can be used in a number of ways in your HR department. For example, you can use it during the recruitment process to present potential candidates with a puzzle or challenge to solve instead of using standardized testing. 

Your employee training program will also be highly automated with the use of gamification, you can essentially just set it and forget it. It can be used countless times by each of your employees whenever they have spare time, wherever they are. This also means that your HR staff won’t need to dedicate their time to training new employees, and it makes it easier for them to track their progress in-app.

At 1Huddle, we aren’t just a lame learning management system that sprinkles in gaming mechanics here and there. We actually harness the power of gamification 100 percent by making our training software a literal game that keeps your employees engaged, fired up, ready to work and peak performance levels. Level up your workforce by requesting a demo today.