GAMIFICATION IN SUMTOTAL

Ineffective training leads to a loss of time, effort and turnover. The average total loss to a business from ineffective training is thirteen and a half million dollars per year per 1000 employees, and forty percent of employees with poor training leave their jobs within the first year.   

You can make your training engaging and more effective with game techniques adapted to learning. 

Gamification in learning and development today has a great potential to engage learners. Eighty-nine percent of employees responded in a survey that they would be more engaged in an e-learning application if it had point-system. Sixty percent of learners would be motivated by leader-boards and increased competition between students.  

Implementing Gamification in learning helps to set goals for learners to achieve, assign them badges on their achievements, and show top performers on leader-boards to sustain learning momentum. 

Reward Learners with SumTotal Gamification  

SumTotal LMS gives you exciting gamification features that help your learners stay motivated and coming back for more.  

With SumTotal gamification you can: 

• Reward your users whenever they complete a task, changing the rewards depending on context. 
• Celebrate by leveling up when they succeed at each learning activity. 
• Award badges as they accomplish learning objectives. 
• Alert your learners with messages on points, levels and badges. 
• Sum up learners’ status on leader-boards that display points and rank of top performers 

Badges and Levels for personalized learning rewards 

You can use badges and levels to show your learners their progress with eye-catching images. Offer them a graphical view of: 

• their current level, 
• points they have earned, 
• status on their progress to next level with points yet to be earned and percentage of points earned, and 
• badges earned and yet to be earned. 

Leader-boards to reinforce learning motivation  

Leader-boards stimulate your learner’s competitive spirit.  

You can use leaderboards to present your top performers and how they level up and down against each other. You can also help learners with a gamification summary that shows where your learners stand in relation to others and the total points and badges your learners have earned. 

Gamify. Reward. Sustain Learners’ Interest 

Make learning an experience that your learners want to repeat. Gamify to reward and improve learning performance.

Gamification has become a widely used technique in modern learning, but teachers have used games for millennia. Even the Socratic Method in Plato’s dialogues is a form of gamification designed to motivate learners. The methods used to issue grades, class rank, and academic honors have existed for centuries. 

Nick Pelling, a British-born computer programmer and inventor, coined the term in 2002, but it wasn’t until 2011 that Gartner added it to its Hype Cycle list. Since then, gamification has become widely used in learning, marketing, and many other disciplines where we want to influence behavior.  

Marketers have been using gamification since long before Cracker Jacks (a prize in every box!), and now it is everywhere we shop. In the corporate work context, it is popular in sales and customer service. 

Gamification by Domain 

SumTotal enabled gamification by domain beginning with SumTotal 19.2. Administrators can now set up Rule sets that award points, badges, and levels for taking part in: 

• Learn activities, courses, and modules; 
• Talent workflows, such as 360 feedback and coaching; and 
• Social activities like blogs and shares. 

Here’s a quick review on how to enable gamification by domain. 

• Enable gamification settings in the Global domain by in the Gamification Configuration workspace. You can then use gamification differently in child domains. 
• Control whether a domain inherits gamification from its parent domain by checking or unchecking Inherit parent domain settings in Gamification Configuration. If you choose not to inherit, you can configure the current domain (the one you are in) with its own Rulesets. 
• You can disable gamification for any domain in the hierarchy. 

Get the complete instructions in the SumTotal Core Platform Administrator Guide, Version 19.2, available at SumTotal Connect. 

Social and Cultural Impact of Gamification 

Although this improvement may seem like a minor change, it can have a significant impact on your organization. This change came about because global customers said they could not use gamification without the ability to manage it by domains. 

Here’s why. A game element designed to affect a specific objective is affected by individual reactions and the personal and social context. Those factors influence an individual’s participation, behavior changes, and the outcome.

National cultures, organizational cultures, and even micro-cultures within organizations can drive different reactions to gamification techniques.  

• Competing with one’s coworkers may be unacceptable in some cultures. 
• Being singled out as a high achiever may have negative social consequences in some contexts. 
• Some subcultures may view gamification as “manipulation” and resist participation. 

Before you Flip the Switch 

We recommend careful planning and preparation before you start, even if your workforce is homogeneous. Introducing gamification is an organizational change that you must manage if you want positive results. 

Align gamification to the business. A successful gamification project requires the support of your top executives. Points, badges, and levels will have no meaning unless your leaders recognize them as valuable to the organization and recognize the achievements. There must be a connection between the activity and organizational performance. 

Align to your culture. Tap into the cultural norms of your workforce and let those norms be your guide. 

Involve end users in the design. More than just gathering input, this means bringing end users into Rule sets development. The tendency may be to involve only enthusiasts, but skeptics can be valuable in helping you avoid missteps. 

Measure results and redesign. Gamification activities create a lot of valuable data. Use it to refine your program. 

Let Culture Be Your Guide 

Gamification is a powerful tool but used incorrectly it can have negative consequences. Consider your culture and its subcultures before you act. Bring your people into the design so they can guide your efforts. 

References :

1. Landers, Richard N., Elena M. Auer, Andrew B. Collmus, and Michael B. Armstrong. "Gamification Science, Its History and Future: Definitions and a Research Agenda." Simulation & Gaming: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Theory, Practice and Research 49.3 (2018): 315-337.

This month’s Lunch and learn session at our Irving headquarters happened on July 31^st, 2019. The topic was SumTotal Gamification.  

Improving workforce performance has become crucial than ever in this digital age. And the way organizations do is by offering training. But what if training does not drive value? 

It is found that the average total loss to a business from ineffective training is $13.5 billion per year per 1000 employees, and forty percent of employees with poor training leave their jobs within the first year. 

Thus, a quest for modern learning strategies that engage learners is constant. 

SumTotal has been evolving to make work process interactive, engaging with its easy to use tools. And Gamification is one of its best features. 

Well-designed gamification produces benefits at every level of the organization: individuals, work groups, and the organization itself. If you begin your gamification efforts by establishing the desired outcome, you can achieve improvements in productivity and profitability. 

SumTotal LMS gives you exciting gamification features that help your workforce stay motivated and coming back for more.   

• Gamification in Learn can motivate people towards learning and improves engagement. It can help learners complete their compliance training which otherwise would seem dry and can also foster personal and professional development. 
• With Gamification in Talent you can reward participation. It can be used to motivate people to participate in multi-dimensional feedback. You can use it to foster a performance culture, where everyone gets involved in each other’s development in the 360 process. 
• And Gamification in Social rewards participation in conversations about how things get done, knowledge sharing, and fostering a sense of common purpose. 

In this learning session, Sasi presented on how you can 

• Set up Gamification in SumTotal 
• Drive Learning, Engagement and Performance  
• Apply best practices to succeed at implementing gamification 

And the session ended with the success story of a leading technology and data analytics solutions provider implemented gamification for their new manager training and drove the following results 

• On time attendance increased up to 45% 
• Online discussions rose from 0 to 95% 
• Skill port course completion improved up to 90% 

You can watch a recording of the full session by clicking on the play button above. 

Pixentia is a full-service technology company dedicated to helping clients solve business problems, improve the capability of their people, and achieve better results