Five Tips for Using Games to Train Your Employees
Games can be powerful tools for team building and training. According to behavioural research, gamification helps increase intrinsic motivation in employees. Péter Deli is an editor-in-chief that knows all about training his teams. He takes us through some tips on the best ways to use games for training employees.
From traditional team-building to using a bingo játék, there are many fun ways for your employees to learn. Gamification is an effective tool for training in any industry and is an amusing way to get new skills and knowledge by using elements from games, like tokens, levels, leaderboards, and more. Both employees and employers enjoy using this technique as it enhances engagement and learning outcomes.
When considering team building card games, you should look into Tuckman’s theory on team development. He states that effective teams go through certain stages before they can work together. The first stage is forming, where the team gets to know each other. They then go through a storming phase, where they utter their genuine opinions and start having conflict.
Once the dispute is resolved, the team will go through a norming phase to begin understanding and working together. Some groups carry on to the performing stage, where optimal productivity is reached. Once you know this theory, you can effectively design your game to get employees through these stages and become productive.
How to Create an Effective Training Environment
You should find an effective way of combining fun with education. Here are the top tips on how to use employee training games.
Use Stories
A compelling story is an excellent way to engage your employee’s emotions to help them remember information. Add a storyline to your games to help the employees remember critical facts and other information. The most important aspects of a good story are the characters, the story’s plot, an element of tension and resolution of this tension. The story doesn’t have to be complicated to be compelling. Make sure you put some thought into the storyline to engage your team.
Play with Conflict
Every good game has some sort of conflict or obstacle to overcome. Conflict can help your employees learn skills to cope with everyday life in the workplace. Overcoming obstacles together in employee training games will also make your team trust each other and feel more like a unit.
You can use elements like time, quality, and budget to create conflict or an obstacle to overcome. This strategy uses real challenges in the workplace to improve skills. You can make card games for training purposes that can simulate some of these aspects.
Aesthetics
If you want to get your employees immersed in the game, you need to spend time on the aesthetics. When designing card games for training, create graphics that appeal to players. There are some paid online resources that you can make use of, while others are free. It’s worth investing in the aesthetics to engage your team in the game.
Find a Balance
Team building card games should be challenging enough to keep the players’ attention. On the other hand, they shouldn’t be too difficult or frustrating for your employees. You should find the balance between challenging and fun so that your employees enjoy the games and learn the critical information you intended to teach. It’s worth investing time and money to find this balance.
Hand Over Control
Players want to feel like they have some control over their playing, as do employees over their education. Allow your team some authority by giving them choices throughout the game. You can provide various paths to choose from so that the gameplay is unique for each player based on individual decisions. Not only does this make the game more fun, but it also allows your team to learn by taking small risks. They can learn from mistakes and retain critical information through these choices.
Final Thoughts
Games for training employees are fun and effective. It will take some effort to design engaging, fun games that help your team learn critical skills. If you invest time and effort into these games now, it will save you time and money for the future. If the team enjoys the games, they will learn faster and retain more information, which could prevent expensive mistakes on the job.
