Can Gamification Make Onboarding Cool Again?
Well, it’s been disrupting the HR process, and in particular, it’s threatening to make onboarding cool again by presenting an irresistible suite of gamified onboarding technologies to get HR salivating and send FDS and budget holders running for cover.
These gamified onboarding tools work by allowing businesses to easily set learning challenges, games competitions and contests for new hires, which motivate them to seek out information and learn new things about the business and how to socialize. Think about how LinkedIn gives you a chart of profile completeness and sets your tasks—like making 50 connections, adding a photo, etc.—and incentivizes you with delicious statistics such as you are many times more likely to be head-hunted if you do this. That’s gamification of onboarding members into the LinkedIn platform at a basic level. It turns the registration process from a boring chore to an engaging assignment with a positive end goal.
Using gamification during onboarding will rejuvenate your onboarding process, making it more engaging, and will allow new hires to acclimatize to the business more quickly and effectively. This reduces their time to reach peak productivity and reduces premature turnover arising from poorly onboarded employees. So, what tools can you use to gamify your onboarding process? There are four worth mentioning:
This system has been used by the likes of SAP to train new hires about the company, competition, policies, customers and technologies. It also encourages socialization by motivating online social interaction between new hires and their colleagues around the business. It uses badges, leaderboards and points to encourage repeat visits and learner engagement. The pricing model is a per user, per subscription model with a low upfront cost. However, it is geared toward medium and large companies.
This company offers a gamification tool that allows you to easily incorporate recognition, team play and collaboration through the onboarding process. The system contains rewards and recognition to help motivate new hires to educate themselves about the business, culture and people. It helps them to socialize. The site is not forthcoming on pricing, but there is the mention of the term ERP, which suggests this tool is geared toward enterprises, but surely worth a demo.
This is an onboarding gamification platform used by the likes of Kelloggs and Comcast, so it clearly has an enterprise customer leaning. This is an online training portal that you can use to educate new hires about the business. It has an emphasis on encouraging social interaction between users and on driving social and informal learning, which can reduce onboarding time. Now, this is more of an all round training portal, which has an onboarding module. It comes with a 14-day free trial.
They offer seven or eight specialist gamification products based on their own gamification engine, and they have a specific training module. This product is probably the least user friendly and is not specifically geared toward onboarding and HR, but if you are looking for a system that can be easily adapted because you want to do something slightly outside of the box with your onboarding gamification, this may be the system or service for you.
So, for me it’s pretty clear that there are lots of gamification tools out their which can turn the somewhat transactional onboarding into an engaging, compelling social and learning experience. So, yes, I do believe gamification can make onboarding cool again.