Let’s face it, training employees is not fun, but it is something every business owner has to do. It’s a long, tedious process that very often goes on to long, and is not as effectual as it could be. So how can companies obtain a higher return on their investment and have more enjoyable experience training employees? One leadership coaching style is to gamify employee training. Let’s look at what gamifying entails and how it can have an effect on employee training.
Leadership Coaching Style: Gamification
Gamification is the process of turning any ordinary task – such as training employees – and turning it into a competition between the “players” (employees). Each employee is now playing a game against other employees with incentive to win. The natural human yearning to win something can create an atmosphere full of eager employees willing to learn faster, perform more efficiently, and become more intertwined with the company.
Introducing gamification can either be simple and straightforward or a complex system that requires managing on its own. For instance: Zappos, the online shoe marketplace, has chosen to integrate gamification into their entire company, the game? The Face Game. When Zappos employees boot up their computers they are met with a photo of another employee along with a handful of names. The employee has to guess the correct name the corresponds with the photo. If the employee guesses correctly then they receive the bio of the person in the photo, if they do not guess correctly, then nothing happens and they can continue with their normal day.
This is a great example of gamification because it promotes corporate culture while at the same time not taking away a chunk of time from the work day. At the same time their is no penalty for employees that guess wrong, making sure that there is no added stress to the work day. Each part of their daily business operation can be thought of as a move in a very elaborate game where employees work to not only improve the status of the company, but also their status in the game. If the rules are written so that winning the game is also a win for the company, this method of employee motivation can be irreplaceable.
Gamification does not, however, have to occur on such a large-scale. A small training game where new employees look to earn points by completing newly learned tasks better than their coworkers can improve performance.
As with any method, care and technique must be used when devising and employing gamification in the workplace. By coming up with a good plan that helps both the business and its employees, everybody wins. Contact us to learn more about leadership coaching.
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