Maggie Evans 
There’s nothing wrong with a little healthy competition in the workplace. Competition helps to keep employees motivated to push themselves and achieve more.
Scott Crockett, CEO, and founder of Everest Business Funding say that healthy competition can improve quality in the workplace and inspire innovation.
There are potential downsides to competition, of course. Companies should foster healthy competition between employees while ensuring the competition isn’t about choosing winners and losers.
Here are some ways you can foster healthy competition while avoiding the negative aspects of competition.
Provide Incentives
One way to foster healthy competition is to provide incentives for employees to achieve specific goals. When you reward exceptional performers with various incentives monetary and non-monetary you’ll be motivating workers to outdo one another in a healthy way.
For example, sales teams could reward the employees with the newest accounts or most revenue for a particular month. All sales employees will compete to reach the top, and the incentive will motivate them to succeed.
One way to avoid the negative aspects of competition in this realm is to change the incentive’s goal. If you only reward the top sales each month, you could be regularly rewarding the same few employees, causing the others on the team to feel down about themselves.
Provide Ongoing Feedback
Whenever you are working toward a competitive goal, it’s essential to provide ongoing feedback. For most employees to perform as well as you want them to, you need to balance consequences and rewards.
Once that balance is in place, you need to provide ongoing feedback so employees can see where they stand. This will help foster healthy competition between employees.
To avoid the negative aspects, make sure to balance positive and negative feedback for each employee. Too much of one or the other is never a good thing.
Objectively Measure Performance
To foster healthy competition, you should objectively measure performance — and do so in a public way, if possible. Going back to the sales team example, you can post on a whiteboard in a conference room the updated sales numbers by a team member as the month progresses. Or, you can have a shared online document where people can view this progress.
By sticking to objective measures that everyone can track, you’ll be fostering healthy competition. As employees see the updated metrics, they’ll be able to judge themselves against their coworkers.
Scott Crockett says you can avoid negative aspects of this by taking care of how and where you post this information. You don’t want to single out a member of your team who doesn’t match up with some other team members.
Pit Teams Against Each Other
A great way to combine teamwork with competition is to pit separate internal teams against each other. Competition doesn’t just have to be among employees; it can be between groups of employees, too.
This strategy will foster that same healthy competition while also promoting teamwork.
About Scott Crockett
Scott Crockett is the founder and CEO of Everest Business Funding. He is a seasoned professional with 20 years of experience in the finance industry. Mr. Crockett’s track record includes raising more than $250 million in capital and creating thousands of jobs. Scott has founded, built, and managed several finance companies in the consumer and commercial finance sectors.
