Speaker 1: I was asking an e-learning designer last week why she wanted to gamify her training and she said because most of the people who leave our company tell us they're leaving because they hated the onboarding training. And you only need to go to Reddit to know that this happens all the time. Quote, our onboarding was, we got a letter of policies from our boss that was from an old job he worked because he missed editing out the old company name. Then an orientation where he proceeds to read the letter word for word only stopping to tell funny stories. We hit the four hour mark and we're only about 40% of the way through the letter. But it won't surprise you to find out that a strong onboarding process can improve productivity by more than 70% and retention by a whopping 82. So if you want to have more real world impact with your training, onboarding is a great place to start. And to help with that, today I'm going to give you some practical strategies you can use to gamify your onboarding and start employees off on the right foot. And if you're new here, my name is Mary Jo, I'm a former video game producer and this channel is all about using real game mechanics, not gimmicks, to make your training more effective. I have a program for e-learning designers if you want to get great at this and you can find out more about that at the link below. Now let's get started. Okay, so here's a list of the typical learning objectives you'll see in a lot of onboarding programs. Other than the fact that they're all pretty unsexy learning objectives, they actually don't have that much in common so it's important that we match the right game mechanic to teach each one well. We can't use a one size fits all approach here. So let's explore how to gamify each of them starting with company mission and values. I've seen a ton of trainings where they just give you a list of the company's values or maybe a video. But instead you can turn this into a simple activity that will have real world benefits. For example, see if you can get this right. A customer service representative stays late to help a client resolve a critical issue even though it's past her working hours. This is an example of which company value. Innovation, integrity, dedication, or teamwork. That's right, dedication. Wasn't that fun? Try one more. An employee finds a way to streamline a process that saves the company time and money. Which value is that? Diversity, efficiency, respect, positivity. Right efficiency. This may be a very easy task but you're making the learner actually think about the values which makes them more likely to actually remember them than if you just show them a list. But on top of that, you're giving them examples of how those values actually apply in your company day to day and that makes them more tangible. Okay, now let's look at rules and policies. Let's say you have a company handbook where employees can actually find all the rules and policies. This is something they'll always have on hand so they can refer to it. And if you drag them through it with a section by section explanation, you're really not making them think so they might zone out. Instead, here's how you could teach this actively. We start with a short scenario. A programmer wants to take a half day off. How should he go about it? Typically here you'd have multiple choices with the right answer usually being the longest. But instead, make them look it up in the handbook and assemble the right answer. Employees must notify their supervisor at least 24 hours in advance by filling out a leave request form. Or an employee witnesses a coworker engaging in inappropriate behavior. What should they do? Report the behavior to HR using the incident report form available on the intranet. You're making them craft the correct response by finding the section on reporting misconduct in the handbook. And because they have to get all these elements right, there can easily be over a hundred possible permutations so they can't just wing it. They have to think. And again, you're putting the policy in real context. Maybe you're not expecting them to know all the policies, but they've just learned that they go to the handbook for that sort of thing. Doing it this way might sound harder for the learner, but remember they actually have the answers. And if you're really worried about that, you can even provide hints. But if you do that, I'd recommend you make those hints optional so that people who want to have a real go at it can try to solve it on their own. Next up we have compliance and regulations. This sounds similar to rules and procedures, except that if someone messes this up, like they violate compliance, the consequences are way worse than if you just fill out the wrong form or get a company value wrong. So I'm going to set the bar higher for these and to do that, I'm going to put them through an entire active learning stream for it with introduce, practice, and assess. For example, keeping our client's data safe. Really important. In my introduce loop, I'd make them actively figure out how to safeguard the client's data. For example, how to tell a phishing email from a legit one. But then I'd give them a lot of practice with that. So unlike when we were talking about company values where I only have one example per value and if they get it wrong, I might give them the right answer. This time, I'd have a whole bunch of increasingly difficult examples where their job is to find hints that indicate that this might be a phishing email. I'd keep them practicing with or without hints until they're able to pass this perfectly in the assessment without hints. This ensures that they not only know that data safety is important, but they actually know how to do it. And the fact that you're spending more time on those mission critical policies in the onboarding reinforces how important they are. Alright, next we go on to the office tour. In here, let's make it interactive and problem driven by using a virtual scavenger hunt. That way, we're helping new hires not only be familiar with the office layout, but also where to go for human help with real issues they'll face. So where would you go if your computer is broken? Okay, IT is over here. What if I have a question about my paycheck? This is where you'd find payroll. If you've lost your access card, let's try the security office. Notice that these are super short scenarios, not big long stories. And notice that you can even make them explore inside each location so that they'll have to look for objects or resources inside each room. Where do you go if you want a snack? Well, I can see that in the break room there's some vending machines and some fruit at reception. Those are right answers. So I'm not just giving them a list of items or departments to find, though you can certainly do that, but I'm actually describing the situations where they'd consult that department and they can use deduction to figure out where they should go with each problem. And if you don't want to build a nice isometric model of your office like this, a top-down map would work just as well to let them know what's available and where to go with any issue. And finally, we have software systems training, like for example, filling out your timesheet. For this, you can actually simulate the process, first making them fill out a timesheet with a lot of guidance. So here I'm actually saying, click here, choose this, enter that, which introduces them to the procedure. Then you can make them practice a couple of times with less and less guidance and more and more complexity until they can do it with no guidance at all. For the software systems, I'd only spend a lot of time in the onboarding if it's something everyone does a lot, otherwise they'll forget it anyway. Most employees will also have to learn systems that are specific to their role, and for that, you can either make a separate training or you can make them choose their department and only present them the systems that are relevant to them. One thing I really hope you realize out of these simple examples is that you don't need expensive software or complex game design skills to leverage good gamification in your onboarding or anywhere else. But by giving a little bit of love to your onboarding, you're not only creating an experience that's actually useful, you're also giving new hires a great first impression of the company, making them feel more confident in their new job, and helping them be at least 70% more productive from day one. If this was helpful and you want to learn more about how to gamify e-learning, get in touch, the link is below. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.