Onboarding gamification is a strategy that employs various video game mechanics like progress bars, scores, leaderboards, quizzes, and rewards. The aim is to boost new employee motivation and morale during the onboarding process.
This article explains what onboarding gamification is and how to use it to enhance and optimize your employee onboarding process.
What is gamified onboarding?
Gamification is an excellent tool for boosting new employee retention rates and user engagement throughout the onboarding process. It applies video game design features to non-game functions as a means of encouraging specific behaviors and positive outcomes.
Just like a video game can get players to keep at it, gamified onboarding gets new hires to perform various tasks that might otherwise be somewhat repetitive or boring. Filling out paperwork or going through compliance training is oftentimes tedious. But by imbuing those procedures with a sense of meaning and autonomy, new hire engagement often increases. Gamifying the onboarding process is about introducing game design elements into the learner’s user experience with the help of a SaaS (software-as-a-service) learning platform.
Common onboarding gamification features include:
- Progress bars
- Avatars
- Leaderboards
- Rankings
- Badges
- Collectibles and other rewards
- Encouraging tokens (likes, shares, emojis, etc.)
These gamification strategies make the onboarding program more fun while also engaging users in the process. For example, you could have a leaderboard showing who is getting the best score on training assessments to incite a little healthy competition. Or you could have a badge celebrating learners who interact the most with fellow learners to encourage social interactions.
The goal of gamification is to create a feeling of accomplishment and immediate feedback every time learners succeed in overcoming a challenge. It allows learners to practice their skills in a fun and exciting environment, while also encouraging them to achieve more.
Benefits of including gamification in employee onboarding
Gamification is one of the most important tools in a company’s belt when it comes to making a great first impression. It does so by improving the new employee’s experience during onboarding.
By gamifying the user-onboarding program, companies can experience four major benefits:
Increased employee engagement
If your goal is to boost employee engagement, then gamification is the way to go. Statistics show that gamified initiatives in the workplace have increased engagement by 48%. Whenever new employees have fun at work or get to engage in a bit of friendly competition with their peers, their focus and interest increase.
Onboarding gamification elements put a fun twist on a new hire’s duties. This often changes their perspective on their onboarding responsibilities from something they need to do to something they’re looking forward to doing.
Boosted social interactions
Since a gamified onboarding process often has social elements in it, such as leaderboards or rankings, it gets new hires to interact with their team members. This helps eliminate the feeling of isolation, especially in the case of remote hires, and brings colleagues together.
Decreased employee churn
If your onboarding gamification manages to increase employee engagement, it will likely decrease churn. A study by Gallup has shown that employees who experience a high degree of engagement are 43% less likely to leave.
If you have a high turnover rate, it usually means that you have an issue with your onboarding process.
It’s either too difficult, doesn’t prepare them enough for their new role, or is too dry and uninteresting. If it doesn’t include elements of the company culture, it could also alienate the new hire. An effective onboarding strategy will use gamification to increase its retention rate and lower onboarding costs due to losing talent and new hire investments.
A positive impression of the company culture
As new hires are coming to your company, you have a relatively small window to show them exactly what you have to offer and why they should stay with you long-term. This time frame is the onboarding process.
How you choose to present yourself will mold their impression of your overall company culture, no matter how much you try to highlight it through words alone. If you say that you’re committed to learning and development, you need to show it. You also need to make an appeal to their emotions and ensure that they have a memorable experience. Working for your company should also be fun!
Gamification as part of your onboarding training program will show your commitment to learning, growth, team building, and a good time.
Quicker new hire productivity
Gamified onboarding will make the entire process more enjoyable. This, in turn, will speed up learning, engagement, and new hire acclimatization to their job roles and workplace environment.
Onboarding gamification helps you structure the learning material in a more easily digestible way, reducing new hires’ confusion and shortening their time-to-productivity period.
5 gamification tactics to use in your onboarding program
Gamification elements come in various forms and are used to generate different types of reactions from users.
These gamification tactics aim to boost user engagement and the learning experience as part of an onboarding strategy. To implement these best practices, however, you’ll need to use a learning management system (LMS) that fully incorporates game mechanics in its programming.
#1: Have employees level up
The purpose of leveling up in video games is for the player to accomplish a series of tasks before they can advance to the next tier. In a corporate setting, leveling up refers to setting up a series of goals that new hires need to achieve throughout the onboarding process.
A professional onboarding LMS should allow you to set specific goals for new recruits to accomplish. These should start off easy, oftentimes as a fundamentals refresher, and work up from there. As employees level up through their onboarding process, they are kept motivated to continue.
Almost 86% of new employees quit a company after only six months if they don’t have clear objectives and goals to strive towards. Setting up goals (levels) as part of your onboarding program can be active or passive.
- Active level-ups use assessments like questionnaires and regular performance reviews to gauge an employee’s abilities in their new role.
- Passive level-ups use an onboarding checklist to let new hires know whenever a new goal has been reached. This form of goal setting usually handles compliance, company culture, and other human resources-related topics.
#2: Encourage healthy competition with leaderboards
While it might seem a bit counterintuitive, a bit of competition between peers can help engender a real sense of camaraderie. In this regard, leaderboards are an excellent gaming feature. They help motivate employees to keep learning as a means of ranking higher on the board. In addition, they make for great icebreakers as team members compete against each other and compare scores around the water cooler.
To effectively integrate leaderboards into your onboarding process, design a clear and specific set of rules for assessing performance. For example, you can add points every time a learner completes a training course and subtract points if they fail an assessment.
Also, keep in mind that employees should have the option to learn at their own pace. This means they can opt out of the leaderboard if they wish to do so.
#3: Consider adding rewards and incentives
Everybody likes to receive a reward after a job well done. Who doesn’t like the idea of some sort of bonus for reaching a certain target? And while physical rewards like a cash incentive are great, psychologically speaking, it doesn’t really matter if they’re virtual, either. Rewards motivate people even when they’re not in the form of money.
A common practice is to offer employees a certificate, points, or a badge after they complete their onboarding program or certain onboarding tasks. You can even integrate your gamification reward system with the leaderboard for a more comprehensive experience throughout the onboarding program.
#4: Pair gamification with social learning
In a corporate setting, a training program should turn new hires into productive members of the team, not solo players. By pairing gamification functions with social and informal learning techniques, you get users to compete against each other while also bonding. Think of creating a trivia contest, quiz, or learners’ league.
By making social learning more fun, you encourage a learning-centric organizational culture. Gamification essentially rewards those who exhibit a teamwork mentality and also a competitiveness.
#5: Personalize the gamified challenges
You can personalize the gaming environment of your onboarding process by customizing training to meet each learner’s needs. These needs are usually based on their unique roles, responsibilities, and departmental settings.
To boost the overall user experience of your e-learning content, ensure that it caters to their requirements at every stage of the onboarding program. This makes every training session highly relevant to every individual learner.
You can further customize the learning experience by allowing users to create their own avatars. Additionally, they can choose the type of training content they prefer, like video, audio, infographics, or text. They should also be able to choose the type of learning path that makes the most sense for them depending on their current skill level, job role, areas of interest, type of device they’ll be using, language, etc.
All of these customization features make the learner take more ownership of their training by making it feel personal.
Quick tips for a successful gamified onboarding process
Before the article wraps up, here are a few tips for making sure your gamified onboarding process is successful. :
- Know your target audience: If you want it to be successful, take a page out of video game design—you need to understand the target players. Some are motivated by quizzes and games, others by badges and rewards, while others might want to compete with their peers. By knowing what your employees want from their onboarding program, you can add the right gaming functionalities.
- Know your end goals: Be clear as to what you want to achieve by gamifying the onboarding process. Whether it’s employee engagement, faster time-to-productivity, or higher retention, setting clear goals helps you design the right processes.
- Start small: You don’t need to gamify the entire onboarding process right from the start. It’s better to try different gamification strategies, see which work for you, and build on it as you go.
- Always focus on employee experience: Ultimately, the main purpose of gamification is to improve the user experience. No matter what goals you’ve set, it’s through the employee experience and engagement that you achieve them. Always keep an eye on how learners experience your gamification features. Do this via surveys, feedback, and progress and achievement tracking.
- Have a purpose: Last but not least, don’t use gamification simply because others are doing it. If you don’t see the purpose, gamification will not help you improve your onboarding strategy. Have a sound onboarding strategy and a professional LMS capable of delivering your goals.
Gamify employee onboarding with a next-level LMS
Onboarding gamification is an essential part of getting your employees engaged and interested in learning. You can get the most out of what gamification has to offer by using an effective LMS.
Such a learning platform will allow you to incorporate these gaming features into your onboarding program, allow for personalization, and track performance every step of the way. Schedule a demo with Docebo today and see how gamification boosts the effectiveness of your employee onboarding program.