Application of Online Gamification to New Hire Onboarding

Abstract

While employees of the Industrial Revolution were manual workers, employees of the Information Age were considered as knowledge workers, employees of the Technological era are a new breed of generation known as Digital Natives. Employee profile since the Industrial revolution has changed from being workers who performed repetitive and limited range of physical tasks, to those performing roles involving the creation and utilization of information for the purpose of gaining business advantage. The Digital native generation, however, has altered our perception about how employees need to be engaged and challenged at their workplace. This new generation also pose and additional challenge to heads of the organizations in general and HR managers in particular on how to manage them effectively as they bring with them unique work skills and attitudes. As such it has become imperative for organizations and HR managers to particularly invest money, time and energy to understand and leverage on the different ways in which digital natives think and behave. In this paper, the authors share their experience and data of applying an innovative approach of using online social tools and gamification for successfully engaging and training new employees at a world's leading Fortune 100 organization.