Gamification to support new employee onboarding

When joining a company, an employee clearly needs more than a welcome letter. New team members need to build a network of contacts to find their way and take ownership of their responsibilities. Employers must provide support and appropriate onboarding programs to help them settle in. Gamification is one option.

During the first three months, a new employee builds the foundations and relationships that help them feel comfortable in their role (Forbes). With the right support, they have a more positive attitude toward work and work harder.

Yet the importance of good onboarding and training processes, including for longer-serving employees, still seems to be underestimated.

The reality in companies

According to Isabel Sandoval, an occupational psychologist from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, “Companies today provide standard onboarding, which tends to be repeated across industries. It consists of a welcome letter, introductions to the team and a video or manual explaining the software to use or concepts employees should know.”

A study by the American magazine Training, with more than 50 years of experience in workplace training, reports that 78% of companies investing time and money in employee training over a year increase productivity by 10%, while 54% also see increased employee satisfaction.

But onboarding and training alone do not create productive, engaged and knowledgeable employees. We need to consider how and why those processes work. They need clear objectives and should be engaging and collaborative, allowing knowledge to flow, be shared and genuinely absorbed.

Gamification supports corporate training

Gamification appears to meet all these requirements. By applying game techniques, corporate training can pursue specific objectives in an enjoyable, playful way while encouraging healthy competition. New platforms make this possible through mobile training that employees access on their own phones.

When an onboarding program is well designed and properly delivered, information is retained more successfully, especially through familiar everyday devices such as smartphones.

“Content must be clear, precise and genuinely focused on what employers want to communicate so employees can do their work as well as possible. If it is delivered through a phone, an everyday object, retention will be greater because interaction with the content is more natural and less forced, making it more familiar and easier to digest,” the psychologist concludes.