Getting employees excited about ethics and compliance training is a challenge every compliance team faces. However, there are some ways to make this type of training fun, memorable, and meaningful.
If your business is ready to strengthen its programs to enhance employee training and get your people more engaged, it may be time to harness the power of gamification.
What is Gamification?
Gamification is the process of adding gameplay mechanics or features to a non-game setting to drive engagement, strengthen decision-making, and build loyalty with a brand, product, or service.
Used by retail brands, restaurant chains, enterprise software companies, and a variety of other industries, gamification draws on a range of common game-related elements, such as leaderboards and digital awards, to deliver fun and sometimes competitive experiences to users.
Gamification in Compliance Training
While gaming itself has been around a long time, gamification in the workplace is still a fairly new concept – and it’s gaining traction. As brands like Nike, Google, Cisco, and Domino’s Pizza launch gamification features to enhance business and training processes, more companies are seeing the value and getting on board.
In compliance education scenarios like cybersecurity and data privacy training, gamification gives employees a sense of recognition for making the right decisions and identifies education gaps. By helping employees address real-world problems without the anxiety of failure, gamification opens the door to opportunities for improvement.
For compliance and learning teams, gamification also creates quick snapshots of performance measurement, using the same tools and features to provide quick insights into a program’s success. By showing what works and what needs improvement through game scores, game-based training can quickly highlight where a business may be at risk of future compliance violations, and where more training is needed.
Implementing a game-based solution in compliance training offers businesses a range of benefits by:
- Increasing and measuring retention months after formal training ends
- Reinforcing key messages throughout the year
- Helping companies react to situations as they arise
- Capturing employee attention in an already loud communications environment
How Gamification can Enhance Your Training Program
Employee Engagement
Employee engagement has traditionally been a sore spot for businesses with conventional corporate training programs. When gamification is involved, however, 80% of US workers find the training process more engaging. Here’s why:
In addition to offering videos and reading materials to help employees gain valuable compliance knowledge, supplementing training with game-based scenarios provides a more interactive and rewarding experience. It’s through this experience that an emotional connection is created, which encourages employees to become more deeply invested in the training process, and to more closely link their day-to-day behaviors with the company’s values and code of conduct.
Memory Retention
While instilling knowledge of compliance and code of conduct topics isn’t always easy, gamification makes it easier for employees to retain and use information by creating a more memorable experience. In fact, a study by EHS Today shows that gamified training improves employee recall performance by leaps and bounds, with 35-65% of employees reporting better knowledge recall as a result, versus 10-20% who only participated in a traditional training program.
In the long term, helping employees access the information they received during ethics and compliance training can have a huge payoff for an organization. By improving knowledge retention, employees make better-informed decisions that contribute positively to the business, which is key to creating a stronger company culture. What’s more, because gamification increases and reinforces retention even after formal training ends, compliance and learning teams are able to dedicate more time to enhancing other programs that address critical business and employee needs.
Instant Feedback
In most businesses, employee performance is measured and communicated only after training is completed. With gamified training, however, employers can receive instant feedback, enabling them to identify gaps and areas that need improvement throughout the training process.
Providing instant feedback to employees during the training process offers two benefits to companies.
First, it lets learners know how they’re progressing with training materials, and makes them aware of any gaps in their own knowledge. This helps employees identify where they will need to focus more of their time in order to meet company standards for demonstrating understanding of certain topics.
Second, it gives compliance and learning teams more insight into the success of training programs by making gaps on certain subjects and training modules more apparent, which teams can use to boost program effectiveness. In addition, knowing these gaps exist can make supplemental training easier to implement throughout the year, giving businesses a clearer picture on where their efforts should be focused.
Putting Gamification to Work in Your Business
We believe in the efficacy of gamification, which is why we offer one of the industry’s only gamified compliance training solutions – our Beat the Clock Refresher Quiz. Customizable and available in 22+ languages, this unique training program helps reinforce key messages and capture employee attention, making it a powerful addition to any compliance training program.
