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Some healthy competition in the workplace can give your team productivity a boost. But beware, there’s a right way to incorporate competition and a wrong way to make it a part of your corporate culture. When it’s a positive influence, competition in the workplace can make your staff more productive, engaged and energized. However, it can lead to bitterness or rivalries if done wrong. Here are five things you can do to encourage a little healthy competition in your company, and make sure you strike the right tone.

  1. Keep it Light

Competition should be fun and engaging at work, not adding extra pressure to employees. Work places are naturally competitive. Everyone is there to do well, beget recognized for their effort, and get ahead. Don’t allow some friendly competition to add stress to the work experience. There’s already enough stress to drive work forward.

  1. Focus on Teams

Competition is a great team-building exercise, and by keeping it to a team environment you can avoid the less friendly and productive side of incorporating a competitive edge into your work culture. Team competitions are healthier, encourage collaboration, and teach teams how to work better together. That’s a win-win in the corporate world.

  1. Monitor and Measure

Keep an eye on how your workplace competitions are impacting productivity. You want to measure your results so you have strong data to back up your decisions. And if things are taking a turn for the worse, you’ll see right away and be able to make adjustments as necessary.

  1. Keep Rewards Reasonable

Everyone competes to win, but the rewards for workplace competition should remain reasonable and make sense given the context of the competition. In some cases, it might just be appropriate to reward the winners with bragging rights, or a silly trophy that identifies them as the winner within a social context. But sometimes a more tangible reward may be appropriate, such as getting to leave early on Friday afternoon, or even bonuses or vacation packages for those really motivated individuals. The trick is to keep the reward linked to the competition and give everyone a fighting chance to win.

  1. Stay Focused on What You Want to Achieve

It’s easy to get lost in the competitive excitement these sorts of events or activities can generate, but remind yourself and your employees the end goal is the only goal. If your contest was built to measure how many calls your customer service reps handle in a day, make sure the quality of the service doesn’t decline. Your end goal is more customers served well, not more customers served poorly.

For more tips on how you can help your teams achieve more this year, contact our team of client managers at Verum Technical today. We can’t wait to help you build a winning team!