How many times are you distracted or interrupted during a normal work day?

What about your learners? How often are they pulled away from their planned activities?

Let’s face it: distraction often feels like the norm for many of us. Your learners are likely no different: they have a long list of things to get done each day… and the training you want them to take may not be a top priority.

And while training might not be high on the priority list for learners, it certainly is a high priority to you. How do you make sure real behavior change happens when a new product is launched, an important new procedure is rolled out or the organization must comply with a new regulation?

For starters, you must think of training as more than a one-time event. You need a strategy that engages learners before, during and after the primary training event.

Here are some tips for doing just that.

Engage Learners Before Training

1. Implement a promotional campaign

We often challenge trainers to think like marketers. What is the implementation strategy? How will you promote the training to learners? How will you show learners why the training matters and how it connects to them?

For example, if you have an upcoming product launch you could formulate a communication plan that includes at least three to five messages about the launch, using a couple different channels. Spark interest through a series of emails, promotional graphics, videos of key stakeholders talking about the initiative, etc. Get creative and plan on a series of messages across multiple mediums.

2. Incorporate story and theme

Once you have a promotional campaign in place, you want to think about how to tie the entire training experience together. One way to do this is by using a story or overarching theme. In serious games, story is a narrative that either weaves through an entire game or sets up the reason you are playing the game and elaborates on the theme.

The “Hero’s Journey” is one such theme we often use in projects for clients. It almost always leads to a powerful and inspirational story. For example, when you need a way to motivate employees to follow a process or learn about a new product, creating a Hero’s Journey for them to follow is a great place to start.

Engage Learners During Training

1. (Surprise, Surprise) Use game-based learning

Research shows games are effective for learning. One of the reasons for this is the feeling of “fun” they create for players. For foundational knowledge topics like compliance, a game engine such as Knowledge Guru works well. The game’s story, aesthetics, and mechanics are all already created and you can focus on inputting your questions and answers into the game. The immersion and engagement that game-based learning provides can make a powerful impact on how training is received.

2. Gamify your content

Gamification allows you to add simple elements like points, badges, leaderboards, and levels to static eLearning content to create a more motivating experience. Attaching external rewards to a gamification platform (or serious games) can also motivate learners to complete training they would otherwise find uninspiring.

3. Less ‘Tell’; More ‘Do’

We know that you can’t always completely eliminate lectures during your instructor-led training sessions. But that doesn’t mean you can’t cut this content down a bit. eLearning screens with static text-only content should also be kept to a minimum. You want learners to have more hands-on practice and interaction – both with the training content and other people. The key is to plan activities and interactions that link directly to each learning objective.

4. Challenge your learners

Instead of listing out learning objectives, start your next training experience with a challenge or goal. Every Knowledge Guru Legend or Quest game starts with a goal or quest of some kind. In Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project, her research revealed that challenge and novelty are key elements to happiness. And happier people tend to have more energy and thus, be more engaged in activities.

“Because novelty requires more work from the brain, dealing with novel situations evokes more intense emotional responses and makes the passage of time seem slower and richer.”

The brain is stimulated by surprise, and successfully dealing with an unexpected situation gives a powerful sense of satisfaction. If you do new things – visit a museum for the first time, learn a new game, travel to a new place, meet new people – you’re more apt to feel happy than people who stick to more familiar activities.

5. Create a social learning environment

Although challenge and novelty increase happiness, the most important element to happiness is social bonds. So if you have the opportunity to get all your learners together in the same room, do it! We’ve seen it hundreds of times in Sharon Boller’s workshops. People literally light up and lean in as soon as the shift goes from a presentation to a game play situation.

Engage Learners After Training

1. Space out the learning and repeat concepts over time

Research shows that learning is seldom a one-time event, and learners begin to forget what they learned soon after training. Use the learning principles of spaced repetition to provide both micro and macro spacings of your content. Make sure concepts are reinforced over time to aid in long-term memory acquisition.

The Hero’s Journey, for example, is rarely complete in a day… let alone a 30 minute eLearning course. You want to extend the theme throughout the entire training experience. One client even broke their Knowledge Guru game into a 5-week program with short gameplay sessions and competition each week. By extending your learners’ journey, you also increase the benefits of spaced repetition: learners retain more knowledge when they have the opportunity to apply it multiple times over several days or weeks.

2. Reinforce training with microlearning and mini-games

We specifically designed the Knowledge Guru Drive app for repeat play over a period of time. Learners are given a “Daily Three” of mini-games to complete in their drive towards mastery. The content changes, and only repeat play over several days or weeks will achieve mastery.

Essentially, you can cut through all the noise and distractions with multiple touch points like those mentioned above to make training fun and engaging so people pay attention. Also remember to include practice opportunities and challenges so people become active participants in their own learning.

Gartner Group, which monitors trends across many industries, has labeled gamification as a trend that is sliding into the “trough of disillusionment” within the education industry. Does that mean that it—and its cousin learning games—are dying?

The short answer is no… at least not the good applications of these learning methods.

Instead, it means that we are moving gamification toward mainstream usage and beyond the early adoption stage. It also means that bad uses will become more apparent, as will effective uses. It means that companies who are more conservative—who are the “let’s wait and see how this shakes out” kind of decision-makers—will likely be ready to jump on board soon.

Products that were mediocre and not grounded in good instructional design are going to disappear. However, those with strong underpinnings will remain. Custom initiatives will also get better as people make more thoughtful choices on what type of game or gamification to implement—and when to do it.

Here’s a quick list of things to think about as you consider ways to use games and gamificaition:

• Use a portal. A portal is a web-based access point that shows leaderboards, achievements, levels, etc. With a portal, you can gamify non-game activities and let people earn points or badges based on what they complete or how they progress.  For example, you could gamify your entire onboarding experience by letting new employees earn points for completing specific activities. Gamifying something like an onboarding program can work if the experience will be of fairly short duration (weeks, not months).  Their weakness can sometimes be that people tire of them quickly if they last for long periods of time. They also run the risk of focusing more on completion than the quality of performance.
• Create an immersive game or simulation. Immersive games or simulations are terrific for helping people learn and practice new skills while receiving continuous feedback. These games pull people into them and even make them feel real emotions as they play. They also lay a very strong foundation for extensive post-game discussion as people evaluate the experience and share insights. Immersive games are best when they function as part of a learning experience rather than being the learning experience.
• Produce mini-games focused on reinforcement. Mini-games that require only minutes to play can serve as strong reinforcement tools, helping people to retain what they may have learned as part of a formal training component or helping them to prepare to learn in a more formal way.

Where does Knowledge Guru fit in?

Companies have used Knowledge Guru as a way to prepare people for learning or to reinforce learning. We have some terrific success stories of companies who used Knowledge Guru to help people prepare for launch meetings, as a game activity during a live meeting, and as general training reinforcement. Learners can play it in small increments, so it has the ability to mimic the value of a mini-game while being a more robust experience overall.

Background on Gartner’s hype cycle

Gartner’s hype cycle refers to the cycle that emerging technologies go through on their way to mature usage. There are five stages in the evolution of a technology that makes it to maturity:

1. Technology Trigger – The new technology or concept comes onto the scene. Early proof of concept stories emerge and the media grabs hold.
2. Peak of Inflated Expectations – Early adopters start sharing success stories.
3. Trough of Disillusionment – Interest wains if experiments fail. Producers of technology start to shake out with some providers disappearing.
4. Slope of Enlightenment – More instances of how the technology can benefit the organization start to emerge. Conservative companies initiate pilots and the concept/technology gains broader acceptance.
5. Plateau of Productivity – The technology finds its place and becomes mainstream. Criteria for viability are clear.

Some people cringe when they hear the words “process” or “procedure.” Others appreciate and value them. Either way, processes and procedures are essential to a successful organization. That’s why so much of the training organizations deliver is supposed to help align employees with a process or teach them a procedure.

In an article on process training I wrote for our BLP Lessons on Learning blog, I shared that 41% of respondents to our one of our previous Learning and Remembering Surveys listed policies, process, and procedures as the primary type of knowledge employees must know on the job. This was the most mentioned training topic!

The challenges L&D professionals listed in their survey responses likely sound familiar to anyone involved with process training. Organizations struggle because they have too many processes, too much training for employees to consume, lack of buy-in with key middle managers and lack of real motivation to change habits in the first place. That last reason, getting employees to buy into the “why”, is especially important. It’s not so much a matter of learning as it is an issue with motivation.

Let’s assume that your employees are human beings who are intelligent and capable of following basic steps. They could learn the process and follow it if they wanted to, but they have not found a compelling reason that motivates them to do so. — excerpt from “Is Your Process Training “Nice to Know” or “Need to Know”?

Many of our customers, Johnson & Johnson and Ally Financial to name a few, use Knowledge Guru games to teach a specific process that learners need to follow. We also create many custom learning solutions that include a gaming component where the goal is process alignment. While games or gamified solutions are sometimes the answer, they can only do so much when you have a process problem instead of a learning problem.

How can games and gamification help align processes and procedures?

I mentioned above that games may not be the answer if you really have a “process” problem. We sometimes conduct a training needs analysis with clients to discover if this is the case. If the real issue is that employees either A) do not know the process or B) are not motivated to follow the process, games and/or gamification can help.

Serious games and gamification can…

1. Help employees remember how to follow the process.

We always emphasize the importance of aligning game mechanics to instructional design principles. Our Knowledge Guru platform utilizes spaced learning, repetition and feedback loops, for example. The “Quest” game type includes a Bonus Gate where questions that players missed earlier in the game are shown again. When serious games are aligned with the science of remembering, learners are more likely to retain key facts long after they play.

2. Make Middle Managers Happy… or at Least Happier.

In environments such as call centers or factory floors, managers do not want their employees to take large amounts of time away from their work. Training that is distracting or disruptive to the flow of work will often not be supported. Many of the benefits of serious games and gamification can be realized in just minutes a day. Knowledge Guru “Quest” allows administrators to set how frequently players can play and also allows them to “lock” worlds for set lengths of time. An email reminder can be enabled to invite them back. This way, employees only play in small chunks.

3. Motivate employees to learn about the process.

Most learning professionals first turn to games or gamification because they hope to engage or motivate their learners. Points, badges and leaderboards can help with this… but they are not often enough to motivate by themselves. Your solution might also incorporate story, avatars, minigames and aesthetics to create an experience employees will find interesting.

4. Help build context and relevance.

One of the best way to increase adoption of a process is to show the why. Any game-based solution should make liberal use of relevant scenarios that ask learners to correctly follow and apply the process. Custom-built games can go even further with characters, stories and gameplay that mirrors the workplace. Watch out for solutions that present scenarios “at random” or via an algorithm! There is value in controlling the order in which content is seen so that learners can build on past knowledge from previous sections of the game.