How video game training can boost employee performance
“Marketplace Morning Report” has been covering the nearly $300 billion video game industry and the lessons it can teach us about money, jobs and much more.
Games are becoming a bigger and bigger piece of this economy, and the latest evidence is a study from researchers at Harvard’s and Columbia’s business schools. It finds that “gamifying” employee training can help boost performance. In fact, employees at the professional services firm KPMG brought in more clients and more money through fees after completing new training.
Wei Cai, a professor at Columbia Business School and co-author of the study “Learning or Playing? The Effect of Gamified Training on Performance,” spoke with “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
David Brancaccio: So in-service training for employees, I mean, since time immemorial, giving a trophy for salesperson of the month — that’s a form of gamification. But what you study is something much more elaborate and, I think, immersive.
Wei Cai: Exactly. I mean, there could be different forms of games. But in this study, we actually look at really gamified training. So that’s kind of the the novelty of this study. So once the employee’s logged on to the platform, the employees can design their own characters and compete by quickly answering questions about the firm and its offerings. Employees can unlock locations with new challenges as they progress through the experience. And then, eventually, there will be a scoring system and leaderboard that allows employees to track their progress, compare the performance to that of others, very much like a game.
Brancaccio: And before we get to what you found by studying this, give me a sense of what the problem is that companies are trying to solve.
Cai: So the company is a service-providing firm. The employees actually face clients a lot. But what they’re really encouraging their employees to do is to cross-sell their services. So, for instance, a company has a lot of services, but in one, let’s say, engagement or project, the employee only kind of works on one service or provides one type of service to the client. But the company would like to encourage the employees to also introduce their other services to the client as well.
Brancaccio: I see. So a big, multinational, professional services company — what comes to my mind are things like accounting and doing taxes. And these employees tried out the system and, according to the benchmarks you came up with, did they do better at what the company wanted them to do better at?
Cai: Yes. So based on our results, the performance actually increased in terms of number of clients. Financial performance increases after the adoption of the system.
Brancaccio: We’ve been doing some reporting, and we talked to a young person in Northern California who is just starting out in his video game development career. And he got a job for a company that used games to teach doctors how to use complicated, high-tech medical devices. This kind of gamified training has lots of different applications, even beyond what you studied here.
Cai: You are exactly right. I mean, a lot of firms are doing this. So, for instance, Walmart introduced virtual reality to upgrade employee training. Coca-Cola uses a virtual business simulation game. And then I think the idea is that firms really would like to make the training more effective, more interesting, to attract employees’ participation, and more importantly, to incentivize the true learning. Because for the annual training, people may just say, “Oh, OK. This is mandatory training. I’ll just do it, finish it.” But they might not really learn.
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