Why High-quality Gamification is Worth the Investment

Allencomm is proud to say that we’ve recently received top honors through Training Industry for our award-winning gamification.

Games are one of the oldest forms of human social interaction, helping us learn, grow, and engage in an enjoyable and entertaining way since, well, practically forever! As technology has improved over the past few decades, humanity has found ways to weave sophisticated gaming designs into all kinds of educational and operational efforts. It’s no surprise that they’ve made their way into corporate training as well. Gamification, or the process of applying gaming designs and concepts to training and development, is one of the biggest trends in modern corporate training, alongside best practices like microlearning and video learning.

Incorporating game elements such as challenges, leaderboards, achievement badges, scores, or competition into employee training can have several benefits. First, by adding an element of fun to a training program, learners are motivated to engage with the material. Fostering a sense of achievement or friendly competition through the program captures and keeps employees’ attention and gives them more incentive to absorb the necessary knowledge, thereby influencing their behavior in the workplace. Furthermore, gamification makes great use of concepts such as spaced repetition, repeated retrieval and other mechanisms that promote recall and noticeably behavioral change—all built right into the strategy!

Allencomm is proud to say that we’ve recently received top honors through Training Industry for our award-winning gamification. As part of our celebration for this recognition, and to help put it into context, we want to talk a little about what makes a gamification strategy stand out from the rest and how our method helps us incorporate best practices and go above and beyond.

What sets great gaming designs apart?

As we dive into the why behind quality gamification, first let’s discuss gamification as a buzzword versus as a trend. In the past, there have been critics who have dismissed the concept of gamification in corporate training as a fad—a distraction from the important aspects of training and development, talked about just because everyone else was talking about it. While there are some pitfalls that can occur when gamification strategy isn’t up to par, the prevalence and effectiveness of game elements have shown that they’re here to stay.

Slapping some achievement badges onto a training program isn’t necessarily enough to make gamification a good investment for you, however. Without careful integration of best practices and a well put-together strategy, gamification can cause learners to miss the mark, or even end up rewarding behaviors that are detrimental to the company. It must be built into the process and serve a clear instructional purpose for it to be effective. In other words, focusing on the flashy elements of gamification is an easy mistake to make.

To ensure that the gamification strategy that you are investing in is a solid one that will promote great results (both for employee engagement and for your bottom line), choose to partner with an organization with a solid method for making it work.

AllenComm creates great gamification

Gamification shouldn’t be one-size-fits-all.

Let’s bring it back to our methods—the technology and strategies that helped us be recognized for excellence in gamification. The companies selected for the list we were featured on lead the way in engaging learners through innovative techniques, virtual reality, augmented reality, virtual worlds, and simulations, according to Ken Taylor, president of Training Industry, Inc. This recognition was a great way for us to look back on many of the award-winning gamified innovative designs we’ve produced for major companies over the years.

Through an intensive collaborative process, we work with our clients to develop a strong partnership that allows us to understand how best to meet their needs. Every project is different, so we tailor our gamification strategy in order to promote the behaviors we identified in our needs analysis. Gamification shouldn’t be one-size-fits-all, so a customized approach which incorporates industry research and best practices is the best direction for an effective training program.

Curious to learn more about our strategy? Want to see some examples of gamification in action? Get in touch with us today!