Competition In The Workplace: 3 Approaches That Work

Competition in the workplace is a perennial hot topic, and while some businesses swear by it, others eschew the notion, arguing that people may be naturally competitive but shouldn’t be encouraged to be excessively so. What’s the truth of the matter? While there will always be people who take competition too far, in general, competition in the workplace can be a productive and even beneficial tool. In fact, some of the most successful businesses around integrate competition into their overall organizational culture to drive productivity and profit while energizing staff.

Competition And Your Workplace

Before launching any new competitive efforts within your workplace, it’s important to evaluate current conditions and talk to staff. Some businesses are inherently hypercompetitive. This tends to happen in high-stress industries like advertising and finance, as well as law, which attract very ambitious and even aggressive personalities. If this sounds like your company, it may be both unnecessary and detrimental to staff to push competition further. However, as long as you’re conscious of the line between healthy and toxic competition, you should feel free to try some new motivational strategies.

Approaches That Work

If you’re ready to encourage some healthy competition in your workplace, there are a lot of approaches you can try and it’s worth testing multiple approaches to see what works and ensure that everyone has an opportunity to succeed. Some popular strategies that address different aspects of the workplace include:

• Company Culture Contests: Many workplace competitions are focused on pitting staff against each other to see who can do the most – sell the most products or bring in the most new clients. These are the contests that can be both the most demoralizing for some staff and the most out of control for others. Given these difficulties, consider contests that are based on fun and community building.When trying to emphasize community building, you might host photo contests where staff submit snapshots demonstrating an aspect of company culture, lunch break fun, or the best desk display, or post polls in the staff kitchen. Are your team members still remote? Consider a silly hat Zoom call or digital pet parade. These may not seem like competitions, but you can find different ways to “judge” the categories and even give out funny prizes for different categories.
• Try A Sell-O-Thon: As noted above, sales competitions can get very competitive, especially when they pit team members against each other, but there are ways to design sales competitions to make them more successful.Rather than focusing on a “who can sell the most” model, consider sales competitions that encourage the whole team to meet a pre-set goal in a week or a month so that the overall goal is collaborative. Or, try naming a salesperson of the month that isn’t based just on total sales, but on additional factors like coaching other team members, buyer reviews, and even showing initiative in pursuing additional sales training.
• Gamify The Gig: When people think about competition, many experience negative flashbacks to being the last picked in gym class or other times when they were on the losing side of things. This is one reason why competition tends to split communities in two, between the historic winners and the historic losers, and it’s also why businesses need to rethink how they run them in-house, and a good alternative is to gamify the workplace.

Gamification has become a trendy concept in recent years as more workplace platforms have started to integrate gamification into their interfaces, but you don’t need to build new software to gamify your workplace. You also don’t need to put up a leaderboard to make things more fun, since that will almost certainly make them less fun instead. No, when applying gamification principles in the workplace, encourage team members to compete against themselves, improving week after week. You can even set a margin of improvement as a goal for staff so that everyone is on a kind of equal footing and reward everyone who reaches that threshold.

Every workplace is different, but the vast majority can benefit from competition – or at least games – when they’re designed correctly. And that’s the bottom line: you need to ace the execution so that competition is encouraging rather than frustrating and so that it drives a generally beneficial company culture. It’s a tough balance to strike and one that requires real insight into what your company needs, but the results are worth the effort.

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