Employee productivity and performance improvement can be a result of workplace competition. It keeps your teams motivated and happy. But how much is too much? Here are four ways to foster a culture of healthy competition without jeopardising employee well-being.
This #Transformation Tuesday, let us discuss seven ways to promote healthy workplace competition:
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Participate in team fitness challenges to keep yourself active.
Keep the competitive spirit alive by organizing light-hearted team fitness challenges, such as a lunge or push-up contests. Form teams across the company so that employees can get to know their co-workers in other departments. To keep competition high, provide incentives to the winning team, such as points in your wellness program or gift cards.
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Ensure that the company’s vision and individual goals are in sync.
Connect your employees’ individual goals to your team and company goals to ensure everyone is competing toward the same vision.
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Keep things lighthearted.
Encourage outside-of-work competition to foster camaraderie through activities such as bowling, company-sponsored dodgeball, or park soccer. Alternatively, keep it in the office and try some of our favourite lunchtime games like Jenga, ping-pong, or chair races. Leave the “office talk” at the door and focus on each other.
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Acknowledge employees’ efforts.
When competition is meaningful and employees feel valued, it is most effective. Thank your employees for their efforts with thoughtful incentives or handwritten thank-you notes. To implement a team reward system for recognising peers will contribute towards building team.
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Teach and promote healthy conflict resolution.
Employees can become embroiled in conflict as a result of competition. Competition for limited resources can lead to tension. Competition, on the other hand, becomes a facilitator for innovation and improvement when team members understand how to have a healthy debate and when they openly share their views. The first step is to teach healthy conflict resolution.
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 Establish ambitious goals
Your employees should compete not only with others in your organization or with competitors but also with their previous efforts. Raising the bar and setting loftier goals will help your employees perform at their best.
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 Provide honest performance feedback.
The finest gift you can give your employees is your genuine evaluation of their work. Employees need both benefits and repercussions to perform well. A heavily skewed environment, either positive or negative, will result in instability.
Workplace competition can enable your employees to be more productive, engaged, energized. It can, however, stress them out, undermine their confidence, and cause long-term resentment. Some people are inherently dynamic and succeed in contests, while others are not and will feel embarrassed at the mere mention of competition. Therefore, it is up to the organization to identify and make their employees comfortable enough so they participate and contribute to reaping the benefits of healthy competition.
Written by Faber Aleena & compiled by Faber Mayuri
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