Healthy competition can help make your employees more productive, engaged and energized. A competitive environment leaves no room for laziness or mediocrity. Work competitions are a healthy way to encourage collaboration to achieve a common goal. A properly planned competition can have a positive effect on motivation and engagement. How can you create healthy competition at work?
Identify the business goals
First, you’ll have to communicate what’s driving the need for this competition, the desired results and the timeline. Any competition among your employees should be built to achieve specific results. Your goals may be to reduced expenses, improved efficiencies, increase a certain type of sale, or narrow your time to market? Is it a short-term or long-term goal? Once you have a clear goal in mine, communicate it to your team to drive interest and excitement.
Reward prizes
The rewards for workplace competitions depends on your business and your people. For example, at some workplaces, the winning team might enjoy a trophy and recognition at the weekly meeting. Others may be motivated by something more tangible, like getting to leave early on Friday afternoons. Still others will need larger rewards to motivate competition.
Make it a team competition
One-on-one competition has the most potential to go wrong. Individual competition discourages sharing talent, and can cause conflict among your employees. Team competition can still stir the pot and also fuel collaboration among team members. When selecting teams, chose employees with different strengths. Not only will this create more effective teams, but it will also give the members opportunities to learn from each other while competing.
Monitor your team
Some people need to avoid stress in order to do well while others actually need stress in order to perform at their best. Pay close attention to your team. Healthy competition promotes an “everyone wins” attitude where team members work collectively toward a common goal and the reward is communal. In positive competition, individual team members can also compete to improve their own placement within the team, but in a cooperative manner in which there is mutual respect and pleasant interactions that do not jeopardize other team members. If a competition starts to go off the rails, call a halt to discuss the problems and, if necessary, end the competition.
Keep the goal in mind
It’s great when employees get excited about the competition, but sometimes they can lose site of the ultimate goal. For example, if your contest measures how many calls your customer service reps handle in a day, they might get so focused on speed that they start rushing through calls. Customer service can suffer as a result. Competition can engender a sense of teamwork in the workplace, but make sure it doesn’t cause your team to lose sight of the bigger picture.
Healthy competition at your company can bring out the best in your team. The desirable form of competition is positive, healthy, and cooperative. Competition done right can boost productivity, engagement and energize your team. Challenge your employees to harness all the brainpower and creativity each and every one has to offer.
