How to gamify onboarding process?

Needs and goals of gamification of the implementation process

As a logistics company, we work in very fast and dynamic enviroment, which doesn’t always allow our employees to attend traditional, whole- day training sessions. Our daily agenda can be unpredictable and many external factors can influence our day to day operations. Our goal was to implement a learning strategy which would allow our employees to choose a suitable date and time in which they want to gain a new knowledge, as well as the topic they are interested it. We decided to implement a solution which is fully tailored to our needs, because we know that our employees will accept only the highest quality materials. We also believe that the need for development cannot be forced, and that it is crucial that our team really believes in the value and profits of the trainings we provide. We decided to implement a gamification platform and fill it only with 100% tailored materials suited to our industry, procedures, know-how and company culture. We took our employees for VGL ADVENTURE and proved that learning can be more fun and more effective than ever.

Building engagement in onboarding through gamification

Our strategy was to make the learning process in our company more fun, effective and available for each of our 500 employees, working in 16 officess across Poland. We hire the best people in the industry, and at the same time the average age in our company is only 30. That means, that our team is consisted of young proffesionals who are making VGL GROUP one of the best Logistics companies in Poland. Our employees are also very demanding and straight forward about their expectations. We observed, that traditional training methods are simply not effective enough for our employees, but the need for development and trainings in general is growing every year. We decided to digitalize our processes and invest in the most modern solution we could find in the market – a Gamification Platform provided by Westhill Consulting. Since then, 80% of trainings (including onboarding) are digitilized and upload not into a well known e-learning system, but an interesting and challenging game which engages the user, rewards him and makes him attached to the platform and characters in it. At the same time, our employees have a total independency in choosing the topics they want to explore, time and whereabouts of the training.

Implementation

We were lucky to find a provider, who took care of technical aspects of this projects, and we could focus on what was crutial for us – the content, the story, and the promotion of our tool. The whole proces started with establishing a learning plan based on feedback and surveys from previous years. We engaged people from the organization who had the knowledge that we wanted to share it in our platform. We made sure that a person who prepared the material had the best knowledge of the topic as well as company rules and culture. We invited external trainers, who have been working with us for years and knew our emploees to support us in preparing training materials. After gathering the knowledge we would decide how to present it on a platform – we could design it into quizes, simulations, animations, graphic posters or simpy short e-books followed up with interactive excercise. We put between 6 and 10 new tasks every two weeks, making sure that the time people needed to complete all of the tasks was maximum 2 hours per week. The story that our players followed was an missing employee, who didn’t come back home from a training – the goal of the user was to find out the clues about where he might be. The VGL ADVENTURE project was a secret until the day the platform started. In the morning of day 1, every employee has found an envelope with a letter inside, asking if they have seen Paul, the missing employee and inviting them to travel through Europe and help to look for him. The whole promotion started 3 weeks earlier with a teaser campaing, which make people believe that we might have lost an acctuall employee….

Results

70% of our employees decided to join us in the journey and expand their knowledge during our digital trainings. An average user completed 99 tasks during 7 months of the VGL ADVENTURE PROJECT. The final feedback was beyond our expectations. The platform not only delivered the knew knowledge but also reduced the stress of our employees and made them feel more satisfied about their work in general! Our platform turned out to be a place, that our employees would log into during break, to relax and do something productive for themselves. Instead of scrolling Facebook, people decided to complete a task and follow the story. After 7 months we knew that we have to continue with the platform in the future, because it became an important part of our company culture and well-being of our employees.

VGL ADVENTURE is a modern, well executed and pioneer gamification platform which delivers learning and development goals, engages employees, creates a positive space for them to learn new skills as well as share their knowledge. It is more that just a learning system – it’s a part of company culture followed by constant will of develoment and sincire care of our emploees. We asked what was the best part of having the platform in the company – the most common answer was