Kahoot! brings onboarding sessions to life

In their onboarding program, Todd and colleagues run several tracks. There is an onboarding track that everybody attends, which is held 3 times a year. It’s a blended type learning course, with online training modules and training in person. After they integrated Kahoot! into the learning path throughout onboarding, it significantly increased engagement, brought amazing dynamics to their sessions and boosted knowledge retention.

Participants love the challenge of the competition and seeing their names on the top of the leaderboard. According to Todd, Kahoot! is a great way to break up the training, retain the knowledge, and keep everyone engaged.

Kahoot! has really helped Todd and other trainers solidify what trainees learn. Here’s how he described the impact of the new approach to training: “We’ve tried using it in many different ways, but it seems to work best for us if we use it to reinforce each topic that we teach. This keeps trainees engaged all day. It’s interesting to see them so excited, and literally jumping around! (and that fun is really “contagious”, I assure you!)”

In addition to the three onboarding training tracks mentioned above, there are smaller sessions run on hospital level. In this case, the team also uses Kahoot! extensively, but more as a survey tool and less as a mainly educational activity.

During their onboarding sessions, trainers at Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals host at least 7 kahoots throughout the day. They cover a multitude of topics throughout the day, from organizational setup structure to corporate partners to programs and events. After each presenter has gone through their slides, they play Kahoot!. Driven by the motivation to get their names on the leaderboard, participants feel extra motivated and pay attention to the content.

Phones are welcome!

In the interview, Todd shared with us that many trainees were positively surprised by phones being allowed during the onboarding course: “It’s cool when the new people join the onboarding class. They ask “Wait… are we going to use our phone during the training? They usually tell us to put it away!”

More Kahoot!-based activities ahead

As the feedback from trainees and results of the sessions have been really positive, the organization started looking for new ways to use this new way of training. Many employees who completed the training in the new format liked it so much that they started planning how to use it in their respective hospitals.

According to Todd, he and his team are planning to integrate Kahoot! into more activities organization-wide:

• Play in team mode across the country.
• Incorporate Kahoot! into more learning paths on hospital level.
• Use Kahoot! challenges to engage participants at home to review and reinforce knowledge.

Kahoot! decreased the workload for the helpdesk

In addition to much higher engagement and knowledge retention, Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals have seen another significant improvement:

“Our hospital helpdesk, where employees call in to ask questions, has seen a dip in the type of questions they ask based on the information and the training they get during the onboarding process. They’re not asking questions about the things we’re training them on during onboarding, because they’re being reinforced by Kahoot!,” Todd shared.