The ability to learn is increasingly fundamental to the modern worker, so any methods that can be deployed to help improve our abilities must be taken seriously.  A recent Harvard study explores the impact gamification has on our ability to learn at work, and finds that it very much depends on the levels of employee engagement in the workplace to begin with.

The researchers conduct a field experiment in a global professional services firm after they introduce a gamified training platform to try and enhance the understanding and awareness by employees of the firm’s value proposition to customers. The idea was that a gamified approach would provide a more engaging learning environment.

The platform itself allowed employees to design their own character and then race those characters around the world by answering questions about the firm’s offerings correctly.

The company in question had 26 offices throughout the country, and these were randomly assigned to either the treatment group or the control group. The treatment implemented the gamified learning platform over several months, with the researchers assessing the effects of the platform on performance and engagement.

Gamified learning

The researchers find that employees performed better after adopting the platform when those same employees were engaged in their work. This could be because the very nature of the game revolved around the company itself, and so employees that are happy at work might be more inclined to engage in such learning, but the authors believe that engaged employees might also be more inclined to learn more widely.

“Spending more time and effort on gamified training improves performance among highly engaged employees and worsens performance among less-engaged employees,” the authors explain. “This finding suggests that engaging already motivated employees with gamified content can be a successful strategy, but the same strategy may backfire for less-engaged employees, for whom the gamified platform may serve as a distraction from the job.”

It’s perhaps a little dangerous to read too much into the findings given the quite specific nature of the learning.  Things might have been different if the learning benefited the employee rather more than the employer.  Nonetheless, it does provide some food for thought and remind us of the need to test out platforms before we assume that they will have a uniform affect across the business.