The top 3 ways to use serious games in your business

The way we do business is in a constant state of change. Technological innovations and disruptions, generational shifts in culture, and global events mean businesses small and large need to be agile and adaptable to survive.

One innovative tool that has particular utility for businesses in our ever more digital workspace, and that can be especially effective when applied to the increasing workforce of digital natives, are serious games and gamification. Games have been a staple of entertainment and recreation throughout modern history, and as they’ve become more complex, and as the understanding behind what makes games work has advanced, their utility in the business world has become recognised, been proven to be effective, and demonstrated to be repeatable across different sectors and different functions.

What are serious games?

Serious games are games designed with a serious purpose, that is to say, other than for pure entertainment. This doesn’t mean they aren’t engaging, and even “fun” to a degree. The reason they work is because the serious purpose they’ve been developed around is embedded within an engaging, interactive game, that appeals to a person’s natural curiosity and innate desire for challenge, among other psychological levers.

Serious games are a distinct concept from gamification, which is defined as adding game elements into typically less playful contexts. So while you can gamify a process by adding leaderboards or rewards to a business function, you’ve not necessarily made it into a game. It’ll still be a function of your business, just with some game mechanics applied. A serious game must be a game in and of itself.

The top 3 ways to utilise serious games

If serious games are a new concept to you, the odds are you’ve experienced some form of serious game without realising it. It’s also highly likely that your serious game playing experience occurred through work or training, possibly even as part of a recruitment process or an onboarding exercise when you joined a company, or perhaps during your education.

While the practice is innovative and developing at a rapid rate, the implementation of serious games has been around for a while and has proved a success in many different business applications. They offer an engaging and motivating experience for employees, as well as a safe, low-stakes environment in which to learn skills which could be extremely high pressure in the real world. For employers they present a flexible training and messaging tool which is just as effective online and remote as it is onsite, and an easy way to gather data on performance and proficiency within their workforce.

So now you’re wondering, how can serious games be specifically utilised in my business, and what are the benefits? Read on, as we’ll give you a broader understanding of three of the business functions where serious games offer the most practical utility and repeatable success.

Engaging training

As alluded to, training is a great place to incorporate serious online games. A serious game designed with the specific purpose of furthering an employee’s understanding of a relevant business function, procedural or legal changes relevant to their role, or addressing a particular skill gap, can be a really effective way to engage them in their training.

Transferring the learning objectives into the format of a game appeals to the human desires to win, conquer, interact, and progress. A serious game allows them to do all this while acquiring relevant knowledge or practising relevant skills in a safe, consequence-free environment. They’re able to learn by repetition, and given a safe space to experiment, fail, make adjustments, and develop. A programme of serious game training also allows you to collect data to monitor each employee’s progress and performances within the games. The data collected immediately helps you assess an individual’s progress and proficiency in new concepts, but the data from multiple subjects over time allows you to alter and adjust your games to make them the best training tools they can be.

A good way of doing this would be to customise the Dynamic path™ format. The Dynamic path™ gives you access to every game on the Drimify platform, allowing you to create a series of modules and mini-games that can give your employees a comprehensive step-by-step learning pathway. Everything, from the content, to the difficulty level, to the appearance of the levels and the game generally can be customised so it serves your objectives and reflects your brand.

Effective recruitment and onboarding

Similarly, serious games represent a great tool for not only making your recruitment efforts more targeted and efficient, but allow you to create an engaging and exciting onboarding process. If utilised thoughtfully, particularly in the early stages, serious games also can play a big part in your employer branding strategy. As you customise the content of your recruitment games, you can use every opportunity to promote your company’s vision and values, and leverage yourselves as an attractive employer. You could even devote an entire level or module of a game to that exact goal. It’s important to remember that the job market is a two-way street. Candidates may be competing against each other for the best positions, but so too are employers competing against each other for the best candidates. Recruitment games are a medium that speak directly to the relevant audience, and they’re an area where you have complete control over the narrative to tell your company’s story.

While recruiting, you can use serious games with the purpose of identifying problem solving skills, job-specific knowledge, and even identifying candidates who would be a good culture fit. For example, you could customise the Quiz format on the Drimify platform to identify how applicants would respond to specific situations they might encounter were they successful, and use their responses to help limit the number of less suitable applications you invest further time into taking to the interview stage. The questions could take the form of text, or even video for a more engaging experience, and the answers could take the form of multiple choice, or even open, or ordered answering.

In the same way that training staff further into their careers with your business can be done through a customised learning course, the same principle can be applied to the onboarding process. Games can be customised to give new hires the appropriate level of grounding in any number of business functions to help them to get to know your organisation better, and to learn their roles within it.

An innovative tool for messaging and teambuilding

Serious games aren’t just for training. Governments and nonprofits use serious games for spreading messages and activating communities around causes and goals. The same principle can be applied by your business when it comes to communicating company values and broader objectives to members of your organisation.

You could use the Dynamic path™ format to create a mini course focused on educating your whole workforce on company history, risks you face as a business, corporate social responsibility efforts, as well as the subsequent company direction, with the underlying purpose being to unify your teams behind the values and foster team building. Because games tap into psychological levers such as social dimension and commitment, and act as a medium of storytelling, serious games can create the ideal environment in which to encourage desired behaviours, such as making employees more than just people who do specific tasks for specific compensation, but advocates for your organisation who understand your mission and actively fight for it.

Make your business more agile and more efficient with serious games

Serious games offer a real solution to a lot of modern business problems where traditional methods and practices have become outdated.

Whether for training, recruiting and onboarding, or even messaging and teambuilding, online serious games are just as effective onsite as they are if your teams are 1,000 miles away, and offer a low-stakes environment for your employees to learn and practise new skills through repeatability. Through easy data collection, whatever serious game training programmes you implement in your business, and in whatever aspect, they have the inbuilt functionality to constantly evaluate their effectiveness and be improved with minimal labour cost.

Want to know more?