Ford Mexico has maintained a strong presence in the country since 1925. Currently, they work with 126 distributors throughout the nation, which are made up of approximately 10,000 employees.
Ford Mexico is committed to being the most reliable company in terms of mobility and designing smart vehicles capable of helping people get where they need to go freely and safely. The company opted for a different and innovative communication and training methodology to convey its values and experience to its distributors’ employees.
The challenge: improve the skills of company’s collaborators
The main challenge that Ford Mexico faced was nevertheless covering its training and communication needs for a broad range of job groups who were geographically dispersed. It was all about securing the same vision and having elements of reference that were common to each one’s activities. There was also an intrinsic imperative to ensure recipient participation and engagement in this training and communication process while taking into account the multidisciplinary and varied nature of their profiles.
Solution: Gamelearn video games
It soon became apparent at Ford Mexico that game-based learning was the ideal way to efficiently reach the different echelons within distributor companies in an attractive way.
On the heels of the resoundingly successful pilot involving nearly a hundred distributor training coordinators during a trial run with Pacific, the serious game on leadership and team management, Pacific and other serious games were included in the annual matrix of courses for the following year. Video games were thus assigned to different sets of job positions that encompassed approximately 8,000 people in total.
Merchants, the serious game for negotiation and conflict resolution, and Triskelion, the serious game for time management and personal productivity, were both presented to all areas, including Sales, Services and Administration. The offer for Pacific, the serious game for leadership and team management mentioned above, was extended to all managers and training coordinators.
Finally, the serious game 2100, which boasts a powerful simulator capable of reinforcing customer service-related skills, was assigned to sales consultants and receptionists, who, after all, have more direct contact with the end customers. In summary, the advantages of this sort of gamified training in achieving company objectives were threefold:
- Learning in a simulated and safe environment: Gamelearn serious games afforded a new, innovative and attractive way of learning that broke the mold of more traditional methods. The real cases emulated in the game simulators let training recipients practice in a safe environment.
- Interesting and synergetic training: The quality of the content and gamification elements, which motivated and surprised the players, increased their engagement and enhanced their learning experience.
- Accessibility: In light of the project’s ambitious scope (several thousand collaborators), Gamelearn’s accessible and flexible platform became an essential factor for Ford Mexico. Participants could train whenever and wherever they wanted.
Ford Headquarters in Michigan, US.
Results: corporate culture promoted across multiple department areas
Gamelearn’s serious games became a corporate link for Ford collaborators taking part in the training experience, which, in itself, had already meant the achievement of the expected structuring around consistent corporate benchmarks by the Training and Development area.
Given the large number of students, the completion rate reasonably stood at approximately 75%, since the number of influential factors multiplied almost as much as the number of participants in the training call. For the rest, the response was mostly satisfactory. The elevated ratio of participants who would recommend the training to their co-workers (98%) and the percentage of participants who found it useful for their lives (99%) are good proof of this.