The Importance of Friendly Competition in the Workplace

When I was growing up as a wrestler, I learned a very important lesson: You will never improve without challenging yourself. Back then it meant that the only way to get any better was to take on people of greater skill. Today it’s a little different, but the underlying concept of using competition as motivation for improvement still stands strong.

I’m not going to sugarcoat it for you, we are some competitive individuals here at StringCan (especially Jay). Whether it be around completing a task, reaching our goals, winning our monthly game of pictionary, or a friendly rivalry between our favorite football teams, there isn’t a whole lot that makes us happier than winning. We believe that a friendly level of competition in the workplace is extremely beneficial, and should be encouraged.

Competition is a big driver of motivation, accountability, performance, and innovation. It pushes you to be better. When we engage in a friendly competition at StringCan, we find ourselves exceeding our own expectations on what we can accomplish. After enough repetition, the work ethic that we find ourselves utilizing in our competitive states becomes ingrained in our everyday activities. This forms a cycle of improvement that ultimately makes us more efficient at what we do.

If you are wondering how you can implement friendly competition into your workplace, here a couple of ideas:

Incentivized goal competitions. Create daily, weekly, or monthly contests to see who can perform the best on different metrics. For a sales team, this can be something like leads generated or sales closed. Our marketing team likes to go head to head in number of tasks complete in a certain time frame. It is important to incentivize the competition with a reward to push the competitors past their everyday effort. This can be something simple, like a gift card or a paid lunch.

Team Games. Be creative on this one. At StringCan, we play a monthly game of pictionary. Every month, each team member draws a picture on our whiteboard related to the monthly topic and at the end of the month we all guess each others drawings. Our favorite part of this competition is the tiebreaker. Each team member that was part of the tie participates in a one-and-done pull back toy car race. Tempers will fly and emotions will flare.

Another idea for this is to have a group game of Scrabble. Make your own game board and letter pieces and have each team member take a turn at posting a word and drawing new letters. Whoever has the most points by the end of the month wins a free lunch!

Implementing some type of friendly competition in the workplace will develop camaraderie amongst your team and push everyone to perform at their peak everyday.

If you are looking for any more tips on how to incorporate friendly competitiveness into your company culture, reach out and contact us!