In contrast with the past days of endless seminars and training – both classroom and virtual, gamification is quickly becoming one of the biggest trends in corporate training and e-learning. With elements incorporated to engage different categories of employees, gamification can boost diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.
Employees are looking for more upskilling opportunities that can propel their career growth. They have started to recognize the importance of using tools that engage employees while encouraging behaviour-level change.
What is gamification?
Unfortunately, the word gamification often gets misunderstood as employees pretending to work while secretly playing candy crush or wordle on their phones, wasting their time. But first, let’s start by defining gamification.
Gamification is the use of game elements to facilitate a learning experience. It includes everything from injecting fun into a training session to offering rewards for achieving goals to allowing for a little friendly competition to make an important point. In the past, workplace gamification involved trust-building exercises at corporate retreats to build relationships. However, technology has changed when and how gamification can be used in the workplace.
Since gamification itself is a misconstrued topic, it is seldom used in the context of diversity, equity, and inclusion. However, since it has proven to increase knowledge reinforcement, engagement, and retention, it can be used as an effective tool. It lends itself to addressing serious issues, and even encourages people to tackle topics they may have been reluctant to discuss. Hence gamification, rather than trivializing the seriousness of DEI, can drive the point home and change how people view their own biases and the experiences of others.
An example of the effective utilization of gamification in the context of DEI would be in tackling non-conscious bias– a barrier to inclusion. As mentioned, gamification can increase the involvement of people in areas that they may not voluntarily learn about. Therefore, by incorporating game elements in the process, it is possible to optimize learning and foster behavioral changes, potentially even convincing people to examine their thought patterns and biases in a supportive way.
Although gamification brings about behavioral change and enhances knowledge acquisition, it is necessary to accept that like any training tool, not everyone will feel they benefit from the process. Show why and how the gamification will help and make it appealing to workers. Creating a fun competition with the possibility of rewards or recognition will encourage buy-in. Emphasize that gamification is for fun, not as a way of reviewing workplace performance, and allow participants to feel they’ve accomplished something throughout the process. While gamification injects fun into a learning experience, the game itself must be entertaining without being childish. Topics such as DEI are serious, and they require gamification that treats them as such.
