Enhancing employee onboarding : the power of gamification

In today’s competitive job market, effective employee onboarding is essential for retaining talent and ensuring a seamless transition into the workplace. Traditional onboarding methods can often feel monotonous and overwhelming, leading to disengaged new hires who may struggle to fully integrate into their roles.

Enter gamification—a powerful tool that transforms the onboarding experience by incorporating game-like elements to engage, motivate, and empower employees from day one.

By leveraging interactive challenges, rewards, and social dynamics, gamified onboarding not only makes the learning process more enjoyable but also fosters collaboration and camaraderie among team members.

When studies show that 95% of employees enjoy gamified systems, more companies need to find ways to integrate gamification into their management style. This includes onboarding new employees to engage and motivate them to accelerate their training.

We’ll explain the benefits of onboarding gamification and proven ways to implement engaging and efficient gamification elements into your onboarding process.

Gamification is a technique to integrate gameplay mechanics, principles, and elements in a non-gaming activity or environment. It boosts user engagement by creating a level of competition and play that ignites the user’s interest. Companies that utilize gamification during onboarding can help new employees:

• Learn company culture, norms, and rules
• Develop positive associations
• Learn new skills or company procedures
• Become more proficient in various hard or soft skills

Gamification is a valuable tool for HR because it can:

• Create a more engaging experience for onboarding and training.
• Retain employees and decrease turnover.
• Accelerate new hire training.
• Optimize workflows.
• Attract young professionals.
• Utilize an organized and efficient onboarding process.
• Boost morale.
• Motivate employees to complete tasks and become educated on company policies, rules, and procedures.
• Increase productivity for 90% of your new employees.
• Provide transparency and management.

Human Resources can harness the power of gamification by integrating elements such as badges, leaderboards, points, levels, and challenges into onboarding tasks and training materials. By incorporating these engaging features, organizations can transform the onboarding experience into an interactive journey that not only captures new employees’ attention but also enhances their overall engagement. Here are some key benefits of using gamification in onboarding:

• Motivate employees through rewards and recognition: gamification taps into the natural human desire for achievement and recognition. By offering rewards such as badges for completing tasks or reaching milestones, employees feel a sense of accomplishment. This acknowledgment boosts morale and encourages them to actively participate in their onboarding process.
  Instill a Feeling of Control: Gamified onboarding allows new hires to navigate their training at their own pace, fostering a sense of autonomy and control. By making choices and progressing through levels, employees can customize their learning experiences, which can lead to greater satisfaction and retention of information.
• Monitor and manage employee onboarding tasks: through gamification, HR teams can easily track the progress of new hires as they complete various onboarding activities. This visibility allows managers to identify areas where employees may be struggling and provide additional support or resources, ensuring a smoother transition into the company.
• Spark competition: Introducing competitive elements, such as leaderboards, encourages friendly rivalry among new hires. This competition can drive engagement and motivate employees to perform at their best. As they see their progress compared to peers, they may be more inclined to push themselves to achieve higher levels of performance.

Gamification is a proven technique for increasing employee engagement by 48%. When HR has clear goals for the onboarding program, they can design gamification around the user’s experience and tailor the game elements to company workflows.

Need help building a custom onboarding application? Contact us to get started.

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Here are some proven gamification activities that create engaging onboarding processes:

Virtual Games
Virtual games are an easy way to customize your onboarding training into fun, interactive games. New hires can compete against each other or against themselves to complete specific training modules.

Level Up Challenges
You’ll want to create an onboarding task list that covers all training guidance. You’ll want to create a tiered hierarchy for the tasks. As the new hire completes each level of tasks, they unlock new challenges, rewards, and tasks based on their proficiency. These tasks can level up for learning new skills, procedures, or systems.

Build Friend List & Earn Badges
You can gamify social interactions among employees by having a ‘Build a Friend List’ game. In this activity, employees earn rewards by making connections, messaging other employees, scheduling networking opportunities with employees outside their department, etc. This activity creates a safe environment for shy employees to use the activity as an ice breaker to connect with others.

At Emeraude Escape, we can help you build an efficient onboarding training system, utilizing customized virtual games that your new employees will enjoy. Virtual games are an easy solution for motivating and entertaining your employees while they learn policies and procedures.

Want help designing and implementing gamification elements into your onboarding process? Learn more about our custom gamification services.

Related: Everything You Need to Know about Gamification

Here are some tips for implementing gamification into your onboarding process:

Personalize Your Welcome Screen
You’ll want to start personalizing and customizing the onboarding process when the new employee logs into the welcome screen of your onboarding application. You’ll want to quickly gather critical information.

Award Badges for Completed Tasks & Celebrate Achievements
Award badges and other achievements to celebrate when tasks are completed. This can be as simple as an emoji, celebratory screen, or animated image to take a second and acknowledge the completion.

Have An Onboarding Checklist
Once in the application, create an onboarding checklist that manages and updates the employee’s progress in completing onboarding tasks.

Add a Little Competition
A little competition goes a long way. Leaderboards that acknowledge who has completed the most tasks or logged the most time in the onboarding application can spark engagement and incentive to complete the training.

A excellent example of integrating gamification into their onboarding is Wavestone. We worked with Wavestone to create an interactive digital game to unite teams through social interactions. The game’s goal was to communicate the company’s history and values while giving 300 new recruits, from around the world, an opportunity to connect during the activity.

We were able to deliver a customized, interactive activity under an ambitious deadline of less a month that could communicate key company values and engage the recruits to work with one another. It was a huge success that the teams still talk about as a positive experience.

Gamification is an effective and efficient tool for boosting onboarding completion rates. HR managers should find ways to incorporate different gamification elements into their training workflows to engage and incentivize new employees. Through gamified training programs, HR departments will see higher employee productivity and lower turnover.

Emeraude Escape builds customized gamification solutions for companies looking for more engaging ways to onboard and train their employees. We can customize an onboarding solution for you if you need help designing or implementing gamification elements into your company processes.

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