Onboarding is one of the most important moments in the employee journey. It’s not just about paperwork or orientation - it’s the first experience new hires have with your company’s culture and expectations. A strong onboarding process builds confidence in the company, and accelerates the process of getting your employees successfully integrated into their new role.
More and more organizations are discovering the potential of onboarding gamification. Companies can transform the onboarding experience from a passive experience into an engaging, memorable journey that helps motivate new employees from day one.
Why Traditional Onboarding Often Fails
Anyone who has been in the corporate world for more than a couple of years has had a less-than-stellar onboarding experience. Remember how you felt sitting through dull PowerPoint slide shows, long presentations of company history or a seemingly endless building tour? Unfortunately, many organizations still rely on outdated approaches that don’t match the preferences of today’s workforce. New hires are often subject to:
- Information overload: Hours of PowerPoint slides or dense handbooks crammed into a short window.
- Disengaging formats: Passive lectures, long company history sessions, or repetitive compliance modules.
- Scheduling bottlenecks: HR, managers, and colleagues juggling calendars, which can lead to rushed or incomplete sessions.
- Limited flexibility: In-person tours and meet-and-greets that don’t translate well in hybrid or remote environments.
The outcome for new employees can be confusion, low information retention, and leaving onboarding with more questions than answers.
That’s where gamification in onboarding enters the picture, offering a dynamic, flexible, and engaging way to restructure the onboarding experience.
What is Onboarding Gamification?
Onboarding gamification is the practice of applying game-like elements like points, levels, challenges, and rewards to the new hire experience. Gamification doesn’t mean turning serious training into playtime. It means using proven motivational techniques to increase participation, knowledge retention, and excitement. Think of it as transforming onboarding into a structured journey in an interactive format that engages new employees and motivates them from the start.
How Employee Onboarding Gamification Solves the Problem
New hire onboarding gamification is a solution that can help a myriad of businesses with these issues. Automatically compatible for remote work, gamification can be completed anywhere, at any time. New hires simply log on to the platform at a moment that’s convenient for them. This helps them complete their training incrementally and stay autonomous throughout.
Gamification features like achievements, badges, and other milestone markers also make employees more engaged from the very start—up to 48% more engaged than through a traditional onboarding experience! And gamification keeps expectations very clear. New hires discover precisely what they’re going to learn and how that knowledge applies to their work.
P.S., there are also several benefits your employees, especially in HR, can enjoy by adding gamification to your business processes.
Ways to Gamify New Hire Onboarding
There are many ways to gamify onboarding. Here are a few onboarding gamification examples:
Onboarding can be more fun for everyone involved with real-life rewards and incentives. As new hires make their way through materials, companies can celebrate task completions with swag, free lunch, a gift card, or an actual trophy. Or keep your rewards within your gamification platform via virtual badges that can be displayed to the entire team. These conditions can be customized in any way you desire, so hires can gain one badge for completing onboarding in under or a week, another for training for a lengthier time frame.
Adding levels is an exciting way for managers to track progress as employees make their way through the onboarding materials. This methodology can also help new hires establish actionable goals. For example, if your business implements a learning management system, each module can count for a new level. Once an employee completes “Level 5,” they’re onboarded and done!
Information recall games can help determine how well new hires retain information. Quizzes and judgment panels can be challenging for an employee with test anxiety, yet visual-based recall games such as picture-matching games are much easier for information retention. This makes sense, as studies show about 65% of the population are visual learners.
Ready to Implement Gamification in Onboarding?
Onboarding should be an opportunity to revel in the new energy and talent a new hire is bringing to the team. Why not augment this excitement with gamification in onboarding? Schedule a demo with CataBoom, and we’ll help you craft a unique and valuable experience for every new employee.
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