3 Great Employee Training Games
By: Jason @TStationBlog Silberman
For the past couple years, the idea of gamification to enhance employee training, alleviate tedium and ensure incentive and reception to training, people have unintentionally placed themselves in a position where they pigeonhole gamification into being applied in a specific way. This gives a wrong view of the scope of employee training games.
You see, it leads people to believe they must have a sophisticated LMS in place, and spend days designing complex games to implement it and get anything out of it. While that kind of definition of employee training games is one that fits, there are many games that can be played socially over web chat, or in person. They’re good ice breakers that can help develop core competencies in employees, while engaging them in a way that actually hooks them better.
Traditional classroom activities aren’t going to go over well, so gamification is important today. Further information can be found on the importance of employee training page.
#1 – Old Fashioned Jeopardy
We’ve all watched Jeopardy, and we’ve all played the game of answering the questions ourselves, to see if we can best the people playing. The rules are simple, and easy to implement.
Jeopardy is a good way to drill in terminology and fact retention, while building self confidence in the players, and giving everyone a chance to feel accomplished, and to shot it in front of others. It also incentivizes those doing less successfully to strive to show off how they’ve improved.
This one’s pretty easy to implement, and it doesn’t build problem solving, but since some fact drilling is going to be needed no matter what, it’s a great way to gamify that.
#2 – What Am I?
This one requires a bit more thinking skill and helps to test and reinforce the more intrinsic understanding of material in the students, and help them to cultivate retention not just of facts, but what these facts really mean in the real world.
In this game, instructors pick something, and they give a creative description of it or its purpose, and people compete to best provide an answer to what they are describing.
This one’s fun, especially if you like practical riddles, and I’ve found it works quite well with most people.
#3 – What’s Behind the Box?
This one’s good to build teamwork and abstract thinking skills. Basically, a picture is hidden behind a set of boxes, which are removed one by one. With each removal, the team then looks at what is revealed of the picture, and vote on a guess for what it is. The first team to guess the right thing wins the round.
These games are simple and competitive in a friendly way. Employees training games are a vital way to remove the tedium of training, and engage the students fully. Not only can you encourage thought and eagerness to participate, but you can build strong team and social skills in your people by adapting these to individual and team play rules. There are many other games out there, and it’s easy to find lists of so many activities like these which people will swear by, so don’t hesitate to not stop here, and keep going to see what other games you might like and that your people might have fun working through.
You might be interested reading our employee training plan template as well.
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