Cool Aid is a gamification platform hosted on One Nevada Credit Union’s intranet. It redefines corporate training through an engaging, game-driven experience. Drawing inspiration from SimCity, Cool Aid immerses employees in a virtual world where they compete to build and manage their own personal credit unions.
Employees strive for dominance by attracting members, increasing deposits, maximizing interest earnings, and securing exclusive member bonuses. This dynamic platform turns training into a thrilling race to become a corporate legend.
Program Details
At the heart of Cool Aid is a comprehensive class library of courses designed to enhance employees’ soft skills, technical expertise, and mastery of workplace procedures. A new, expertly crafted course is released weekly, ensuring the learning experience remains fresh, relevant, and engaging.
Employees fuel the growth of their virtual credit unions by completing these courses, accumulating members and deposits that propel them up a real-time leaderboard. Along the way, employees develop practical, real-world skills—such as navigating digital banking tools, ensuring regulatory compliance, and delivering exceptional customer service.
The platform offers a variety of immersive, bite-sized learning experiences such as:
- 3- to 4-minute videos: High-energy tutorials deliver impactful insights in a concise format.
- Crossword puzzles: Brain-teasing challenges reinforce knowledge retention in an engaging way.
- Multiple-choice quizzes: Fast-paced assessments test and sharpen employees’ skills.
- Scenario workflows: Immersive “choose-your-own-adventure” challenges simulate real-world decision-making.
- Role-playing scenarios: Realistic workplace simulations enhance problem-solving abilities.
- Scheduled meet-ups: Collaborative sessions with supervisors or colleagues provide hands-on learning opportunities.
Cool Aid’s real-time leaderboard tracks employees’ progress instantaneously, showcasing their achievements across the organization. As employees outpace their peers and expand their credit union empires, top performers gain visibility and prominence. Managers leverage these rankings to identify high achievers, rewarding them with recognition and certifications upon meeting rigorous evaluation criteria.
To ensure Cool Aid effectively drives skill development and aligns with organizational goals, an evaluation framework is integrated into the platform. This framework measures the platform’s impact on employee performance, engagement, and skill mastery, while providing actionable insights for continuous improvement. Evaluation components include:
- Completion rates track the percentage of employees completing each course and activity.
- Leaderboard rankings monitor individual and team progress on the leaderboard, correlating virtual achievements with skill acquisition.
- Skill proficiency scores assess performance on quizzes, scenario workflows, and role-playing exercises to measure mastery of specific competencies.
The program incorporates short-term reinforcement through tailored categories based on employee tenure and expertise. Employees are assigned to specific groups, such as new hires (less than 90 days), experienced staff, subject matter experts (SMEs), and more. This structure supports customized learning paths, allowing employees at different career stages to build knowledge effectively. Newer employees, for example, can repeat courses as needed to master foundational skills before progressing to advanced levels of expertise.
The Cool Aid platform allows employees to continuously develop their virtual credit union through engaging with new content added weekly to the learning library. Employees can revisit earlier quizzes and puzzles to reinforce knowledge retention from past courses.
Results
Some 42 percent of One Nevada Credit Union’s total staff has been trained by Cool Aid. This accounts for 100 percent of the Retail Operations team, including both branch staff and contact center employees.
Equipping employees with the right knowledge and skills boosts member confidence in their banking choice, driving referrals to One Nevada Credit Union. This has led to a 2 percent year-to-date membership growth, meeting the credit union’s goal.
