What Is eLearning Gamification? 3 Key Tips for Success

Workplace training is far from perfect. If you’ve carved out a career in the corporate world, you’ve probably had a fair share of unending compliance training, security modules, and employee surveys. 

On the other hand, if you’ve ever spent time at a startup, you might have been expected to begin work within the first week without so much as a proper orientation.

Neither of these is a great approach to instructional design.

However, by introducing gamification to your workplace modules, you can create training that actually excites employees and moves the needle in your business.

What is eLearning gamification?

Gamification refers to the integration of game design elements into non-game contexts, like your company’s corporate training and employee development programs. 

Ultimately, the goal of applying these gamification techniques to your online learning modules is to increase your employees’ engagement, motivation, and enjoyment in the learning process. 

How does this game-based learning work, exactly? 

A good way to think about it is to draw a comparison between the rewards and incentives you’d typically find in video games and the rewards employees can earn in gamified training modules. Some of the more common examples of gamification in corporate eLearning include points, badges, leaderboards, challenges, quests, rewards, avatars, progress bars, and unlockable content – the same rewards you’d find in a video game. 

However, the big difference here is that these mechanics rely on the completion of eLearning programs, like mandatory compliance training or employee onboarding.

These game elements provide employees with motivation to complete assigned training, instant feedback, and, most importantly, a sense of fun while completing their learning activities. Rather than simply reading text or watching videos, these gamified courses allow learners to earn badges for completing modules, unlock new content by earning points, and compete on leaderboards. 

Extensive research has even shown that gamified classes in higher education lead to better learning outcomes. Your workplace training can also realize similar gamification benefits, such as greater knowledge retention and increased course completion rates.

The key features of successful gamification

Gamification isn’t a plug-and-play strategy that starts working as soon as you introduce a few game mechanics into your workplace training. Rather, you need to be very intentional about how you build out your gamified training in order for it to be successful. 

Here are two strategies you can use to get started:

Set clear objectives and goals for your learners

Defining clear learning objectives is crucial when you’re trying to gamify your employee training programs. But you can’t set up goals at random. Your goals must provide purpose and direction to learners as they progress through gamified activities. 

For example, if your sales and marketing team aims to increase the number of demos completed each month as their quarterly key performance indicators (KPIs), then you might set specific goals around completing training on converting marketing qualified leads (MQLs) to sales-qualified leads (SQLs). 

Introduce feedback and rewards

On top of setting actionable goals, giving instant feedback after completing assigned training modules provides your learners with real-time information on their performance and progress.

From here, you can give out rewards like points, badges, and leaderboard rankings. These virtual rewards tap into people's innate desires for status, achievement, and recognition. Leaderboards in particular introduce an element of healthy competition where your employees will feel motivated to outperform their peers and climb the rankings.

4 software tools to create gamified experiences in your business

This article wouldn’t be very helpful without the tools you need to start creating your gamified training, would it? 

Here are a few tools you can use to start gamifying your workplace training, tailored to different use cases:

1. Colossyan

Colossyan is an AI video platform that helps workplace learning teams create interactive, video-based training complete with gamified elements. The tool allows teams to create professional-quality videos in minutes, using AI avatars and text-to-speech technology to cut costs and save time.  

Colossyan’s gamification elements not only make the training process more enjoyable for your employees but also cater to diverse use cases, from sales training to compliance training and even employee onboarding.

Here are some of the game elements that Colossyan provides in its video learning platform:

• Branching scenarios: Allow your learner's decision-making to shape the content they receive in these “choose your own adventure” type of videos. 
• Integrated quizzes and assessments: The videos include quizzes to reinforce learning and provide instant feedback, allowing your learners to gauge their progress and identify areas for improvement as they go.
• Customizable AI avatars: Colossyan's AI avatars can help personalize and enhance the engagement level of your training videos. Additionally, these AI avatars can be customized based on their appearance, speech, and language to match your specific use case.

By combining Colossyan’s interactive quizzes and AI avatar functionality, you can easily create high-quality microlearning content at scale. 

Colossyan’s additional capabilities – like its document-to-video feature – offer more great ways to get your videos off the ground quickly and efficiently. 

For example, upload an employee onboarding document, choose a template, and in less than 60 seconds, you’ll have a video draft that visually explains the information from your document – complete with an AI avatar, voiceover, and images. 

From there, you can customize it to your liking and add more gamified video elements, such as avatar quizzes. This is the fastest way to create an interactive gamified video, while also ensuring that your employees are properly engaging with the information. 

Here’s how Colossyan’s document-to-video feature works:

2. Bonusly

Bonusly focuses on employee recognition and rewards to boost learner engagement. HR teams use the platform to build organizational culture through its robust peer recognition and rewards system. Additionally, the leaderboard rankings, points, and badges that Bonusly users can earn motivate employees to excel in their roles.

Some of Bonusly’s key gamification features include:

• Points and rewards system: Employees can earn points which are redeemable for rewards like restaurant gift cards, donations to a specific charity, or catered lunch meetings with senior executives.
• Leaderboards: Bonusly’s public leaderboards display top-performing employees on individual departments and teams, fostering healthy competition and motivation across your organization.
• Recognition badges: Points and rewards aside, employees can also earn badges from their peers and colleagues based on the criteria of their choice, such as helping with a last-minute project or spearheading a client meeting.

3. Spinify

 Spinify is used for sales training purposes. Its interactive scenarios, quizzes, and leaderboards make the training process more engaging and effective for your sales development representatives (SDRs) and account executives. 

This eLearning platform also motivates sales teams to achieve their goals through public leaderboards, achievement badges, and spin rewards that create friendly competition between your reps. Additionally, you can use the points and rewards system to reinforce desired sales behaviors like prospecting consistency, close rates, and customer follow-up times.

Spinify’s key gamification functionality includes:

• Real-time leaderboards: Spinify provides sales teams with individual and team leaderboards that allow their sales reps to see rankings in real-time.
• Achievement badges: With Spinify, sales leaders can award badges to sales reps when they complete challenges and reach targets.
• Personalized dashboards: Each of your reps will have an individual dashboard that allows them to track personal goals and performance metrics.
• Spin rewards wheel: When they hit specific milestones and goal targets, reps get to spin a wheel for random rewards like gift cards (hence the name, Spinify).

4. Axonify

While the previous tools focused on desk workers, Axonify focuses on frontline employee training using microlearning – short, focused sessions that reinforce knowledge for frontline workers using game mechanics. Axonify’s gamified training includes:

• Microlearning: Bite-size training reinforced with gamification keeps employees engaged without overwhelming them.
• Rewards and recognition: Point systems, badges, and rewards are given for progress and achievements, which motivates continuous learning.
• Personalized content: Employees receive individualized learning paths tailored to their knowledge gaps to maximize training effectiveness.

Real examples of great gamification use cases

Now that you understand the different tools and features that are available to you, it’s time to look at some actionable examples you can work with.

For these examples, we’ll be using our AI video platform, Colossyan, as a reference tool. And no, you don’t need to be an experienced instructional designer to create this gamified training.

Here are a few gamification use cases you can start implementing in your organization:

Set up custom sales scenarios to coach your account executives

Using Colossyan’s sales training template, you can create interactive role-playing scenarios where sales trainees engage in simulated customer interactions. 

Colossyan allows you to use multiple avatars in a single scene, meaning you can select an avatar to represent a potential customer with specific needs or objections in a branching scenario type of video. 

Your sales reps could then work through these scenarios at their own pace to see how a discovery call or sales meeting usually works with a specific customer or buyer persona before meeting with them in real-life.

Create an interactive video quiz for your compliance training

You can develop a compliance training module using Colossyan’s compliance and ethics training template, where each segment of the instructional video is followed by an interactive quiz. For instance, after a video on data privacy, your employees might answer multiple-choice questions about key points covered.

Adding a few of these interactive elements helps ensure your employees will retain the information needed to properly understand your specific industry regulations and requirements. 

Introduce scenario-based learning for your customer service reps

If you want to improve your company’s net promoter score (NPS), you might consider creating a series of interactive scenarios using the customer service excellence template.

For example, a scenario could involve a customer service rep dealing with a frustrated customer. Your service reps could then watch the video and learn the best ways to deal with customer complaints based on your company’s customer service protocols. 

Not only does this method enhance your reps’ problem-solving skills, but it also prepares them for real-world customer interactions in a safe and risk-free environment.

3 strategies to help you get started with gamification 

Ready to start using gamification in your workplace training? First, you’ll need a framework to ensure that your new gamification strategy will be well worth the effort.

Here are three strategies you can use if you’re not sure where to start:

1. Assess your learning objectives

When you’re integrating gamification into your existing eLearning modules, the first step is to identify clear learning objectives. Specifically, you should outline the core skills, knowledge, behaviors, or capabilities you aim to build through the training.

Once you’ve defined these objectives, you can select game mechanics that will help your employees achieve those goals and allow you to build a more engaging learning environment. 

For example, if you’re seeking to improve sales presentation skills, you can implement branching scenarios into your video content to help your reps practice their discovery calls with different buyer personas.

2. Choose the right tools and techniques

Once you determine the learning objectives for your organization, you should identify the tools and gamification techniques you plan to use. Quizzes, flashcards, and trivia games work well for knowledge retention. 

For more complex skills, you might implement challenges, 3D simulations, or quest-based learning paths. 

3. Monitor and evaluate your employees’ training progress

After you’ve taken the first few steps and have begun introducing game mechanics into your workplace training, it’s critical that you track your employees’ learning needs, engagement, and satisfaction with your new training approach. 

To do so, you might consider surveying your employees for their direct feedback. Or, you could review the analytics from your eLearning gamification platform to provide data on your course completion rates and the average time it takes to complete your gamified eLearning courses. 

Create your first gamified video for free

You don’t need to shell out thousands of dollars to start creating a gamified workplace training program.

With Colossyan, you can start building interactive video-based training for free. And because Colossyan uses AI avatars and text-to-speech narration to replace the long timelines and equipment requirements typical of traditional video production, you can begin producing interactive videos in just a few minutes. 

‍Sign up risk-free today – no credit card required. Or, book a demo with one of our representatives to learn more about the tool.