Gamified roleplays — roleplay scenarios that incorporate gamification elements like scoring or leaderboards — can be a more engaging way to invest in your team and their skills
In our beginner-friendly guide, we’ll give you everything you need to know about how to gamify roleplays for training, including the benefits, how to design successful roleplay scenarios, example scenarios to explore, and best practices for incorporating them into training programs.
What Does It Mean to ‘Gamify’ Roleplays for Training?
Roleplaying is an up-and-coming tool for training and enablement that’s only become more and more popular. It allows folks to practice their skills and hone their abilities in a no-risk environment. The benefits of roleplaying — especially for training and enablement — are endless.
However, one of the downsides of roleplay as a training tool is that it can get a little boring. You might also face some resistance from teams and stakeholders as you work to incorporate this training tool into your programs. Learning how to gamify roleplays, however, can change that.
For those unfamiliar, gamifying roleplays for training and enablement involves marrying game-like elements with roleplaying scenarios. For example, using things like rewards, scoreboards, and challenges can make roleplay more fun, exciting, and engaging for employees. Not only that, but incorporating these elements also lead to better outcomes for training, like improved business and knowledge retention.
Core Aspects of Gamified Roleplays to Explore
When it comes to gamification, there are tons of ways to add elements to roleplay scenarios to make them more exciting for your team. From leaderboards to challenges and reward systems, here are some core aspects of gamified roleplays to experiment with with your team.
Storytelling and immersive, interactive elements
Although it’s not always first-of-mind when you think about designing roleplays for training, plan to incorporate storytelling and immersive elements. Both of these things can make roleplay scenarios more realistic.
Focusing on the storytelling aspect of a roleplay can make it easier to emulate real situations. For example, if your roleplay revolves around customer service, create a short narrative and backstory for the customer. Maybe they’re a long-time customer but as of late, have experienced numerous issues with the product and are fed up. This kind of situation is realistic and relatable to many folks, and can help your team anticipate similar conversations.
Incorporating levels or challenges
Even if you don’t think your team has a competitive spirit, incorporating levels or fun challenges can make gamified roleplays more engaging. It can also motivate employees to take part as they want to succeed and do well in the program.
In terms of levels, you can have your employees start with beginner-level scenarios and then progress to more difficult, complex situations. To make it more challenging, you can use time constraints by having employees solve a customer issue in under 7 minutes, for example, or other challenges.
Leveraging healthy competition with leaderboards
Similarly, leaderboards can do the same thing: they’ll inspire a little healthy competition among your team while also motivating your employees to do their best. Having a leaderboard that ranks employees based on performance can definitely be a motivator.
However, if rankings don’t seem like a good idea for your team, you could also have your employees pick a nickname or “gamer tag” to use instead. That way, you can still incorporate rankings and see where your team stands against each other, but the other employees won’t know who’s who. For example, the online learning game, Kahoot!, uses nicknames for their leaderboards.
Using rewards to motivate employees
One of the most common elements used to create gamified roleplays is rewards and reward systems. Team leads can incorporate scoring or points systems to measure an employee’s performance. Some tools even use “badges” to recognize specific skills, like “Best Negotiator” or “Excellent Conflict Resolution Skills.” This can give employees special recognition for their efforts, which acts as a great motivator.
Designing Gamified Roleplays for Enablement
The way you ideate and design gamified roleplays will heavily depend on you, your team, your business, and your team and company-wide objectives. However, some general best practices can help steer you in the right direction.
Here are some tips and tricks when it comes to designing gamified roleplays for training and enablement.
Make sure you set clear training goals for your employees
First and foremost, before anything else, set clear training goals for your team. Coming up with some SMART goals that are specific and measurable will ensure your roleplay training and enablement is as effective as it can be. Not only will employees have specific goals to shoot for, but you’ll have a better idea of how to design gamified roleplays for your needs and use cases.
Ensure the scenarios are realistic for your team
Of course, you’ll also need to make sure the roleplay scenarios you go with are realistic to what your team might face. So, for example, if your team works in the customer success industry, roleplays for tech companies won’t be very relevant to the situations they’d face.
To ideate realistic scenarios, think of what situations your team faces on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. You can also get your team’s input through anonymous surveys or one-on-ones to see what they struggle with, what they’d like to work on, and what they’d prefer to practice.
Test and refine your gamified roleplays for training
When it comes to gamified roleplays, many team leads design the roleplay scenarios, incorporate them into training programs, and call it a day. But the truth is, you should be constantly testing and refining roleplay scenarios to make sure they’re as effective as can be. Looking into the ROI of roleplays, including both the tangible and intangible returns, can give you a measure of how successful a roleplay is. Evaluating the ROI against the SMART goals you’ve created can paint a clearer picture of success.
Try to make roleplays fun
Even though the roleplays are for training and enablement, it helps if they’re fun. That’s why gamified roleplays are more successful — the element of fun keeps employees motivated and engaged, and the learning outcomes make them beneficial. Adding a few of those gamification elements, whether that’s scoring, leaderboards, or storytelling, can make a huge difference.
Leveraging Gamified Roleplays Through Yoodli’s Intuitive Platform
For team leads looking to create engaging, gamified roleplays, there’s no better option than Yoodli.
Yoodli is an AI-powered, state-of-the-art roleplay platform and communication coach that provides realistic roleplay scenarios for training and enablement. Anyone and everyone can leverage Yoodli’s scenarios, from students to healthcare professionals to financial advisors and everyone in between. In fact, top brands like Google already use Yoodli for scalable training and enablement.
Users can choose from Yoodli’s vast collection of existing roleplay scenarios to practice everything from skills training to performance review simulations. However, its Builder tool actually lets folks create custom roleplays from scratch that’ll fulfill their specific needs.
Regardless of the exact scenario, users will interact with an AI-generated partner to participate in realistic conversational scenarios. The AI partner listens and responds in real time just like a human would to provide some intelligent back-and-forth banter.
Plus, as a speech coach, Yoodli evaluates every user’s performance during the roleplay to produce an in-depth report with specific insights around their listening, delivery, and speaking patterns. From there, this communication coach gives employees with actionable feedback they can use for improvement. The data and metrics users and team leads get in these reports can be used to gamify roleplays with scoring, too.
Regardless of what industry you and your team work in, you can get started with gamified roleplays for free at https://yoodli.ai/ to boost your team’s skills.
4 Examples of Gamified Roleplays
As mentioned above, the exact roleplay scenarios that are best for you and your team might not be best for another team. It totally depends on your team and company-wide goals. Here are four examples of gamified roleplays you can use with your team.
1. Healthcare simulations with time-based scoring
Not surprisingly, roleplays for healthcare teams are very beneficial for training and enablement. However, the majority of healthcare scenarios are serious and at first glance, it might not seem like there’s room for gamification. However, you can engage your employees with time-based scoring and time constraints, especially because it’s relevant to the healthcare field. Oftentimes, medical professionals face natural time constraints, so it’s a realistic way to add a gamification element to your roleplay. Plus, it can help them prepare for and anticipate common customer questions.
For example, picture a scenario where your team is facing a medical emergency. They need to act quickly within a certain time frame to successfully avert a crisis. You can also throw in some elements of surprise to more closely imitate a real crisis scenario.
2. Onboarding or compliance training with interactive quizzes
Both onboarding and compliance training are great opportunities for gamified roleplays. Traditional training for onboarding and compliance is notoriously boring and much of the knowledge doesn’t end up sticking with participants.
To make it more engaging, introduce interactive quizzes along with onboarding or compliance roleplays. This not only makes it more fun for participants, but it also helps combat the forgetting curve, which improves knowledge retention.
3. Competitive objection handling roleplays
Learning skills like objection handling in customer-facing roles can be tricky because you can’t necessarily gain experience without testing techniques in real time. However, gamified roleplays can provide that simulated environment where folks can gain that kind of experience.
Consider a situation where your team needs to listen to customer concerns and address them without losing a sale. The gamification elements can include points for closing and leaderboards ranking the reps and their sales success.
4. Team-based leadership challenges
When it comes to building leadership skills, gamified roleplays can provide a collaborative, team-based opportunity that’s also engaging. For example, split your team into two groups. Imagine that these two groups are two different teams that aren’t aligned due to a miscommunication or other conflict. The challenge here will be for the two groups to resolve their conflict without yielding on their team-set expectations.
This kind of scenario can help your team expand their collaboration skills while also improving their emotional intelligence and capacity for patience.
Best Practices for Incorporating Gamified Roleplays
Gamified roleplays can be a total game changer when it comes to improving the skills and abilities of your employees. Even so, there’s often a steep learning curve when it comes to the seamless integration of roleplay training. Keep in mind the following best practices when you incorporate gamified roleplays into your training and enablement initiatives.
Using real-time, immediate feedback during gamified roleplays
One of the most underrated tips for leveraging gamified roleplays is incorporating immediate, real-time feedback for participants. However, real-time feedback can help your team course-correct during their roleplay and more effectively learn from their mistakes. That’s why using a tool like Yoodli that offers real-time feedback can revolutionize the way you conduct roleplays for enablement. Even with peer-to-peer roleplay, team leads can pause the session to offer relevant feedback that learners can then implement.
Recognizing and celebrating your team’s wins
It’s hugely important to call out and celebrate your team’s wins. It serves as a reminder that they’re doing something right as well as a motivator to continue learning and improving. For example, you could choose to use a rewards system or simply recognize employees who’ve achieved some success. Sharing these wins with the participant’s approval during team meetings is another way to shine a positive light on their efforts.
Customizing roleplays to tailor them to your team’s needs
Creating gamified roleplays that are customized for the needs and use cases of your team is a great habit to get into. Generic roleplay scenarios are just that: generic. It’s much more useful to design personalized roleplays that target specific needs and challenges faced by your employees. Tailored roleplays will ensure they’re relevant, realistic, and beneficial for training and enablement.
The Main Takeaway
Gamified roleplays are a fun, exciting way to train and certify your employees, no matter what industry you work in. From scoring and reward systems to leaderboards, there are plenty of ways you can gamify roleplay scenarios to benefit your team. With an AI-powered tool like Yoodli, designing realistic roleplays tailored to your employees and their needs is easier than ever.