Gamification is one of the latest tools used across industries and sectors to enhance employee engagement and motivation.
By gamifying mundane and repetitive tasks during corporate processes such as onboarding, you can inspire new employees to learn, explore, and remain immersed in their work.
Organizations that gamify their onboarding processes are also better positioned to create strong first impressions among their new hires while fostering an efficient and enjoyable workplace culture for new employees from day one. However, gamified onboarding systems are not without their unique challenges, which need to be proactively addressed to maximize their potential benefits.
The Challenges of Gamified Onboarding
Over-Gamification
If the developers of a gamified onboarding system focus too much on adding intricate game mechanics, employees could become overly focused on earning points and scaling leaderboards. This could overshadow the system’s actual purpose, which is to provide new hires with the information and protocols needed to integrate successfully into their workplaces.
The risk of over-gamification also can manifest as excessively challenging levels or objectives within games. While objectives must challenge employees enough to keep them engaged, if they’re too tricky, they could lead to despondence or frustration, detracting from the success of onboarding processes.
High Development Costs
Developing gamified onboarding programs can be expensive. In addition to these expenses, they may require large amounts of time, planning, and ongoing revision and maintenance. Gamified elements also must be updated regularly to keep onboarding content interesting and relevant for new hires.
Challenges with Measuring Impacts
While gamified onboarding certainly has its advantages, measuring its actual impacts on employee satisfaction, retention, and performance is not always easy.
Promoting Competition Rather Than Collaboration
Gamified systems inherently promote competition between staff members. When the right balance is achieved, this can foster improved engagement rates. However, it can promote a more competitive work environment rather than one focused on collaboration.
The extrinsic rewards such as badges and achievements offered in games also could undermine new hires’ intrinsic motivation and make it harder for them to develop an authentic interest in their roles.
Appeal-Related Risks
Not all employees find gamified onboarding appealing, and some may prefer a more straightforward approach.
Plus, the one-size-fits-all structure of onboarding games may not align with every employee’s learning and personal preferences. This may pose a higher risk of alienating hires than standard onboarding processes.
Solutions to Onboarding Gamification Challenges
It’s important to address the aforementioned challenges for gamified onboarding systems to have the desired effects on employee satisfaction and retention. This can be done by:
- Researching your audience. Understanding the target audience of a gamified onboarding system is key to effective design. Some users may be motivated by rewards and badges, others by social collaboration or entertaining games and quizzes. Knowing what employees want to experience during onboarding enables developers to add gaming functions that align with expectations.
- Ensuring onboarding learning objectives are clear and achievable. Learning objectives and the gamified modules representing them should always align with the primary goals of onboarding processes. They also must be optimized to meet the needs of hires with diverse learning preferences.
- Recognizing users’ achievements. Point systems and achievement badges are a great start for acknowledging users’ achievements and proficiencies. However, systems should offer personalized feedback to enable new hires to improve and meet desired learning goals.
- Focusing on collaboration, not just competition. Onboarding gamification should take a strategic approach. It must promote peer-to-peer learning and meaningful teamwork to foster a workplace culture with similar values.
- Obtaining feedback from employees. Gamified systems should include elements that enable designers to enhance onboarding processes by obtaining personalized feedback from their users.
The Results of Gamification Optimization
Successful gamification of onboarding processes can bring organizations and their employees a host of unique benefits. The first is increased employee engagement, with statistics showing that gamified workplace initiatives can increase engagement rates by as much as 48 percent.
When new hires have more fun at work and compete with their colleagues in healthy and productive ways, they may show more interest and motivation to fulfill their roles to the best of their abilities. Gamification also puts an immersive new spin on employees’ duties. This helps to shift perspectives and keep them looking forward to their tasks and responsibilities.
Additionally, effective gamification can boost social interaction thanks to in-game social elements such as rankings, leaderboards, and collaborative goals. These elements encourage new hires to interact with their team members and create a feeling of collaboration and cohesion. In turn, this helps to reduce feelings of isolation, especially if some employees are onboarding remotely.
Gamification could help to limit employee churn and improve staff retention rates.
A Gallup study shows that highly engaged employees are up to 43 percent less likely to leave their organizations. High staff turnover rates can indicate problems with onboarding processes. Still, organizations that use gamification to properly prepare new hires for their roles can increase retention rates and keep talent in their ranks longer.
When done right, gamified onboarding can even assist in promoting quicker rates of productivity among new hires.
Gamification makes the onboarding process more informative and enjoyable. It can accelerate new hires’ learning and acclimatization to their roles and teams and reduce confusion. Plus, it can reduce their time-to-productivity periods, helping them start producing high-quality work as quickly as possible.
The Takeaway
Offering new employees a personalized, purpose-designed, gamified onboarding process is essential to keeping hires engaged and eager to excel at their new roles.
Although this approach can pose challenges, numerous solutions address these obstacles and maximize onboarding systems’ efficacy.
By creating gamified systems that tick the right boxes, your organization can develop processes that boost staff engagement and effectively prepare new hires for their roles in a fun and engaging way.
