WHY CORPORATE TRAINING GAMES WORK IN VERY LARGE ORGANISATIONS
Here's something that catches people off guard about training in very large organisations: the problem is almost never that standards don't exist. They exist. In detail. Sometimes painful detail.
Most global organisations have SOPs documented for everything. Brand values are articulated, workshopped, posted everywhere.
There are onboarding programmes, learning pathways, internal academies. L&D teams spend months building training frameworks.
And yet somehow, six months after someone completes their onboarding, you can visit two different locations and see the same process executed in completely different ways. Not because people are ignoring standards. Because reinforcement broke down somewhere between the initial training and day-to-day operations.
That's the part that doesn't scale well; the reinforcement. And it's where corporate training games solve a real problem, though not the one most people assume they're solving.
What Happens Around the 500-Person Mark
Small organisations don't really have this problem. When you've got 30 people, consistency happens naturally. A manager sees something done incorrectly, corrects it immediately, everyone adjusts. Knowledge spreads through proximity. Somewhere past 500 employees, that model just stops functioning.
At Accor, this shows up in interesting ways, explains Pascaline Hazart, Global VP Learning & Development, Accor Academy. You've got people working in hotels across dozens of countries. Some are office-based, sure, but most are on the floor dealing with guests all day. Pascaline explains that training needs to adapt.
"We have people who are on the floor all day. They don't all have access to a computer, and they don't all learn in the same way. So training has to fit around operations."
This isn't unique to hospitality. Talk to anyone running frontline training in retail, healthcare, logistics, even financial services with branch networks. They're all dealing with the same fundamental tension. The standards are clear. The difficulty lies in keeping those standards alive once direct, day-to-day reinforcement becomes inconsistent.
Experience Sticks Better Than Explanation (Usually)
At that point, most organisations lean harder on documentation. SOPs tell you what should happen. Brand values tell you how people should behave. Both are useful. But in real work environments, what people actually do comes down to judgement and pattern recognition at least as much as following written procedures.
Think about customer service for a second. You can write down "be friendly and helpful" all day long. You can define what that means in painstaking detail. But how that shows up in practice depends enormously on context - who the customer is, what they're asking for, what else is happening at that moment, what the person serving them has experienced before in similar situations.
Corporate training games add value specifically here. Instead of reading about standards, learners work through situations where those standards matter. They make decisions, see what happens, make different decisions next time. Over time, this builds pattern recognition in a way that reading procedures never does.
Virgile Loisance, founder of emraude, describes this well.
"The real challenge is deciding what needs to be experienced. That's what allows learning to carry through into real decisions."
That selection process becomes critical in large organisations where there's too much content competing for attention and not everything can be reinforced with equal intensity.
Digital Learning That Fits Operations
Once that selection has been made, the next challenge is practical: how do you give thousands of people access to those experiences without disrupting operations? There's this ongoing debate about digital learning. One side says it's the future of everything. The other side says it's too disconnected from real skill-building. Both are sort of missing the point.
Digital training works when it fits how people learn at work, which is messily, in fragments, over time, between everything else they're trying to do. It doesn't work when it tries to replace human interaction entirely or when it demands people stop their work to complete something that doesn't feel immediately relevant.
Corporate training games (when they're designed well) fit into this reality naturally. They're short enough to use between other tasks. They focus on specific situations people encounter. They can be revisited when someone needs a refresher three months later.
In organisations like Accor, this matters because live training and coaching remain essential but can't be everywhere all the time. Games don't replace those moments. They provide continuity between them.
Pascaline says that digital formats work best as complements to face-to-face learning and on-the-job coaching, not replacements. The goal isn't digitising everything. It's making learning continue functioning as teams grow past the point where informal methods reliably work.
Custom Games vs Generic Templates
Not all corporate training games work equally well. The difference usually comes down to specificity.
Generic platforms offer templates and fast deployment. They're cheaper upfront, faster to launch. But they force learners to translate abstract scenarios into their actual context, which creates friction. People have to figure out "okay, how does this apply to my specific role in my specific location with my specific customers?" That translation step is where a lot of learning gets lost.
Custom training games remove that step entirely. They reflect actual roles, real environments, specific decisions people face in that organisation. The situations feel immediately recognisable because they are recognisable. Language matches how people talk. Scenarios reflect what really happens, not some theoretical version of it.
This matters particularly in organisations with multiple brands or service models. Standards might be shared, but how they're expressed varies significantly. A budget hotel and a luxury resort both have service standards, obviously. But how those standards show up in practice - the tone, the pacing, the level of personalisation - is completely different.
Pascaline highlights this in hospitality: welcoming a guest is universal across Accor brands, but how that welcome gets delivered varies substantially by brand positioning and context.
Custom training games can hold core principles steady while reflecting those differences. They support consistency without flattening everything into one-size-fits-all mediocrity that doesn't feel authentic to anyone. Generic templates struggle with this balance.
That's one major reason the best Serious Game agencies spend a lot of time upfront understanding operational context rather than just jumping straight to production. The specificity is what makes the difference between training people use and training people ignore.
Where Games Fit (and Where They Don't)
Corporate training games work when they're designed to sit inside existing learning ecosystems, not replace them. Live training still introduces standards and expectations initially. Managers still reinforce behaviour through observation and coaching on the job. Games provide a digital layer that supports practice and reinforcement over time, particularly in the gaps between those live moments.
They're useful after workshops but before the next coaching session. When someone needs a refresher months later but there's no scheduled training. When a team member changes roles and needs to get up to speed on new situations quickly. When you need consistency across locations but can't have trainers everywhere simultaneously.
What they're not good for: replacing human judgement, handling edge cases that require nuanced decision-making beyond the scenarios built into the game, or teaching genuinely new concepts that people haven't been introduced to through other means.
In other words, corporate training games don't compete with human learning. They help hold it together at scale, which is a different function.
Common questions about corporate training games
What does a game based learning agency do?
A game based learning agency or company that creates Serious Games designs interactive digital learning experiences focused on practicing real workplace decisions and reinforcing standards through repeated scenarios rather than just delivering information.
Why do corporate training games work well in large organisations?
They support consistency and reinforcement at scale, especially when teams are dispersed, access to live training varies, and informal learning methods stop working reliably past a certain organisational size.
What makes custom training games more effective than generic e-learning?
They reflect actual roles, real environments, and specific decisions from the organisation using them, removing the translation step where learners have to figure out how abstract scenarios apply to their specific context.
How do corporate training games fit into existing training programmes?
They complement live training and coaching by providing a digital way to practice and reinforce learning between formal training moments, acting as a connective layer that helps maintain consistency over time.