On average, your millennial workforce spends more than two hours a day on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and WhatsApp. While workplace practices and media change far slower, millennials have been used to a pace of change that is much faster because of the speed of social media’s evolution. Millennials are used to consuming large amounts of content in bite-sized pieces, interacting with content rather than passively consuming them. If this is the new way that your audience is learning, then why change it? Why not figure out ways that you can fit your learning into this consumption pattern.
As an enterprise, learning manager or team manager engaging with a millennial audience, you need to start thinking about how to leverage these mediums, rather than figure out ways to entice your audience away from them.
WhatsApp has redefined interpersonal communications. From a simple greeting to discussing projects, it is used by over 1 billion active users daily. These users include your young workforce who are glued to this messaging app 24 X 7, sharing jokes and videos.
Here are 5 learning games you can play on WhatsApp to engage your millennial workforce.
1. Connections
Objective: Find the common connect between the three clues which is the answer
How to play:
- Write 3 clues which have a common connect (For example – Design, Phone, Fruit)
- Ask your audience to find that connect and share their answers. (In this case – Apple)
- Reply every answer and try to create engagement by providing hints.
Ideal for sharing general company or product– related information such as things that 3 features your brand offers or 3 features your competitor’s products don’t offer.
2. What happens next?
Objective: To analyze the story and suggest what should be the next step
How to play:
- Think of a situation, like an angry customer or faulty product
- Share a comic strip or a small snippet which highlights this situation or problem
- Ask your audience for solutions
- Congratulate the ones with the best answer and help the others understand why
Ideal for process–related training like customer support or compliance such as a role–playing with a difficult customer complaint or tough sales prospect. You can even try role playing with popular office characters such as Dilbert to give it a fun element.
(Here are a couple of tools for creating comic strips – Toondoo, StoryboardThat, Canva)
3. Factoid
Objective: To showcase your knowledge by sharing an interesting fact about the given item
How to play:
- Share a word (could be a product or brand name, company name or a person’s name) along with a resource file, like a pdf, video, etc.
- Ask the audience to share interesting information or facts related to it
- Just one rule – You cannot repeat information shared by others.
Ideal for product training such as asking them to share information about the latest product range or what happened during a recent visit by management.
4. Word Jumble
Objective: To identify the word from the jumbled letter
How to play:
- Jumble up a word (Example – BMI SWTAON)
- Ask your audience to identify the word.
- Follow up with the correct answer and additional information related to the word. (IBM WATSON – It is a question answering computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language. It uses artificial intelligence and analytical software to answer these questions.)
Ideal for communicating technical terms or important concepts
5. A Daily Whatsapp Quiz
Objective: To win the monthly prize by answering the quiz questions
How to play:
- Send out interesting questions daily on WhatsApp and run a daily contest.
- Maintain a leaderboard for who’s coming out on top and give out monthly prizes.
- Make the questions fun and interesting or even appoint an interested party as the QuizMaster who can conduct this regularly
Ideal for communicating concepts, history, product–related information
These games are simple and easy to play. All you need is a WhatsApp group. Happy playing.
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