Playing For Excellence? How Gamified Training Impacts Employee Performance

The paper from Columbia Business School, “Learning or Playing? The Effect of Gamified Training On Employee Performance,” explores the impact of gamified learning on business outcomes. The study was co-authored by Ryan W. Buell of Harvard Business School, Wei Cai of Columbia Business School, and Tatiana Sandino of Harvard Business School.

Published

June 30, 2023

Publication

Columbia Business

Article Author(s)

Wei Cai

Assistant Professor of Business: Accounting Division

Key Takeaways

Gamified employee training offers demonstrable improvements over traditional methods concerning course completion, employee knowledge retention, and office-level performance outcomes.
Firms that introduced gamified training and successfully implemented it saw several benefits, including the retention of more clients, added clients, and increased revenue.
The benefits of gamified employee training are most substantial in offices where leaders are highly engaged with the training initiative and nurture employee participation or in offices where employees are already motivated to improve their performance.

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