Follow the Leaderboard to Learner Engagement

This is the third and final post in a series on learner engagement. Read the second post here.

As anyone who spent a bored moment or two in class knows, engaging learners has always been a challenge – and that has been true whether the learner is a kindergartner in a classroom or an employee developing new skills in a corporate setting. In the corporate learning world, the advent of virtual and blended learning made the challenge more acute. Thanks to the development of new insights into learning and technological advances, the code to making the virtual learning experience as engaging as face-to-face learning has been pretty well cracked. Yet as L&D professionals are well aware, new challenges continue to emerge. Here are a few of them:

  • The need for continual upskilling of the workforce
  • The ever-more time-crunched and demanding pace of 21st century work
  • The demands from the rising generation of workforce learners that the learning experience meets their expectations as digital natives

One of the changes to learning that these challenges have led to is the gamification of learning, and one element that is really taking off is the use of leaderboards.

Why leaderboards?

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from online games, it’s that leaderboards that display who’s accrued the most points motivate players to keep playing. Whether you’re playing a complex, multi-player game or killing time with a game as mindless as Candy Crush, watching your name climb up the leaderboard makes playing more exciting. The thinking behind leaderboards in corporate learning is that leaderboards motivate your learners to acquire new skills and hone old ones by encouraging a healthy sense of competition and achievement. Learning that’s more fun also encourages learners to make room for a learning break in their busy days.

There’s even academic research to support the claim that leaderboards help engage learners. A study by Richard Landers, Kristina Bauer, and Rachel Callan found that the presence of a leaderboard was successful in motivating participants to performance levels similar to that of difficult and impossible goal-setting, suggesting that participants implicitly set goals at or near the top of the leaderboard.

Leaderboards for cohort-based experiences

Leaderboards can be especially effective for cohort-based programs. They can be used to spur a healthy competition among learners, encouraging those who may have fallen behind to step up the pace. In programs delivered fully or partially in a virtual setting, where learners may be widely dispersed geographically, seeing how their peers stack up helps learners get to know each other better. Leaderboards can be used to showcase how individuals are progressing, as well as how the overall program is faring—a useful tool for managers.

Using a leaderboard for a defined, cohort-based program that has a beginning and end eliminates one objection that some learners have to leaderboards: that it’s difficult for newcomers to ever catch up with those who’ve been earning points for a long while. There are other ways around this problem, of course: leaderboards for different groups, or periodic refreshing. (Anyone who’s tried to learn a new language with the DuoLingo app knows that the leaderboard resets weekly so that, every Sunday, those at the bottom can make a fresh start at joining the upper ranks.) With cohort-based learning experiences, everyone begins at the same starting point, where no one holds an existing (or insurmountable) advantage.

Before setting up a leaderboard for a cohort-based learning experience—or any learning initiative, for that matter—you will want to consider whether the leaderboard concept fits in culturally at your organization.   As learners have different learning styles, and different preferences for the type of content they consume, so too they may have different responses to leaderboards. What incentivizes some learners may in fact be a disincentive to others. Still, leaderboards can be a powerful motivator and an excellent tool for engaging learners that is definitely worth considering.

Have you used leaderboards for your corporate learning experiences? How have your employees responded to them?

Ian Marge is a product manager at Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning. Email him at [email protected].