Have you ever calculated the cost of an ineffective onboarding process? Or do you think that your company uses its potential to the fullest?

Let us imagine now a different situation. All newcomers are introduced to their workplace so well that they can carry out their tasks effectively right from the very beginning. Knowledge trainings produce sales representatives who offer high customer service right from the start. Employees know details about each product from the portfolio and represent the company and its mission in the best way possible. If the description above is not about your company, it is high time you considered introducing the employee gamification software.

Companies that focus on an effective employer branding strategy see some potential in engaging newcomers. That engagement, during their first days at work, may involve meeting the team and preparing the work equipment. But not only. Gamification may also be an interesting layer to knowledge or skills trainings needed to carry out all work duties in a proper way.

A smooth start in a new workplace

Meeting new staff members, preparing the work equipment, installing all needed programs or setting up an account in the main messaging tool used by the company. All these actions are simple but, without proper instructions, they may be stressful and take way more time than you would initially expect. However, by boosting the employee engagement we may turn those activities into an excellent step by step guide, appealing to our new employees. For this reason, we have come up with a ‘welcome game’. A small app where each new employee may enjoy learning all the information they need to start their work by playing games.

The result was nearly 100% of newcomers participating in the game and acclimatizing to their new workplace within the first week at work.

Gaining knowledge as an adventure

Do you use e-learning programs to train your future sales representatives? Or do they receive leaflets, catalogues or other materials to become familiar with your product portfolio or customer service tricks? What results do you get? One of our clients approached us to ask whether we saw a possibility to improve his current results in knowledge training by combining the educational content from e-learning platforms and marketing materials with engaging solutions to create a universal tool to encourage sales forces to improve their knowledge and skills by participating in a gamification scenario.

We implemented a gamification platform that pushes the content about client’s products, customer service and the brand. After adding the fun factor, entertaining storyline and a bit of rivalry, users visited our platform regularly and took as many actions as they could to discover the new content.

The more we know about the users of a gamified solution, the better we can inspire them to undertake specific actions like reading about new products and their competitive advantages.

In our project, we analyse users’ activity month by month and adjust our gamification mechanics to it. Our work brought the following results:

• a 28% increase in the weekly frequency of visits owing to the introduction of a new feature - educational duels between users,
• a 198% increase in the monthly number of openings of the educational content following the adjustment of task mechanics to the users’ preferences.

Information about your employees and their most effective ways of learning can be used to increase the performance of newcomers at work and to plan subsequent trainings aimed at developing their skills.

An opportunity cost of onboarding

Each employee engagement software may have various forms and be used to achieve different goals.

Gamification may have impact on simple tasks connected with starting work at a new company. It can also be a core of the knowledge training program. The right question to ask is not whether to introduce gamification, but what is your current opportunity cost connected with an ineffective onboarding - and how do you decrease that amount with engaging solutions?

Text prepared with cooperation from Comarch.