Our company had a big problem with people not taking our mandatory online training seriously. Even though the higher-ups try to stress how important it is, people will usually flip through a 4-hour online training class in 10 minutes.
My boss knows that I'm an amateur game designer in my free time, so he asked if I could do something to make the training modules "funner". So I spent a little while turning the training into a fun little flash game. It's no Red Dead 2, but I'm pretty proud of how it turned out. For added fun, I created a leader board to keep track of high scores in the company. (The high scores are a combination of fun little gameplay and being able to answer training questions).
The training module ended up being extremely popular. People are spending so much time playing the game and trying to get on the leaderboard. Now the four-hour training is taking on average three days for people to complete. (Considering how mundane most of their jobs are, I don't blame them). Also, a lot of people take the training multiple times. From the logs, I can see that one person spent 13 business days (8 hours/day) doing the training.
My boss called me into his office today and chewed me out over writing something "too fun". He said that upper management is really mad at this decline in productivity in the company, and that it's my fault. I left his office so freaking mad that I had to take a walk outside to cool down.
I feel like I'm being criticized for doing my assigned task too well. But am I being unfair here? How can I patch things up without admitting any sort of fault?
As a side note, the average test score from this training module is now 96%, up from the previous year of 68%.
