Gamify Your Training
Articles / 09 Mar 2021
Have you noticed how much gamification is around you?
Your local grocery chain might have an app showing you the number of vegetables you bought last month, motivating you to stay healthy. Your favorite Friday night TV show might be a competition, maybe even one where you can affect the outcome, making you emotionally engaged. Your company app awards you badges. And your sales team might have monthly leaderboards.
Gamelike incentives are nothing new. For decades, gamification has been thoroughly researched and used to increase employee and customer engagement. And with digital tools, we can turn even more traditional practices into engaging experiences.
However, gamification does not mean you turn everything into a game and competition. Instead, it is about using the essential human motivational drivers that make games so engaging: reinforcements and emotions.
By designing successful reinforcements, both negative and positive, the brain will respond emotionally to those events. And if repeated often enough, those actions will turn into automated habits.
Three tips on successfully gamifying your learning path
#1: Have a balanced mix of extrinsic and intrinsic reinforcements.
Examples of extrinsic motivations can be grades, praise, and rewards, whereas intrinsic motivation stems from something being fun, learning something new, or doing something challenging (enough, but not too hard).
#2: Motivate all player types
If you have a leaderboard and 5 000 employees/students/learners, the chance of getting to “Top 10” is close to zero. Also, not all players are interested in getting on the leaderboard – others play and engage to be social or learn something new. Switch things up! In our next article, we’ll introduce you to the different player types. Stay tuned!
#3: Set clear goals
When designing your learning environment, clearly define the goals.
What is the expected learning outcome? And how can we motivate different learners by setting completion criteria that cater to intrinsic and extrinsic motivation? Which rewards do you get upon completion? And what are the business and learning benefits?
SMART goals are encouraged for personal projects, but you should also set them for your learning objectives. Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-based = SMART.
In our next article, we’ll cover how to motivate different personalities!