A healthy competitive spirit can help businesses be successful, whether it drives a company to do more when vying against a competitor for a contract or pushes individual employees to try to attain the month’s highest sales volume.
A progressive collaborative attitude is another driver of business, fostering positive attitudes and a sense of team accomplishment as well as strategies to increase profits and growth.
Managers have to balance sympathetic and antagonistic relationships to get the most out of their employees. A corporate consulting service can help you work with the two sides to create an especially effective business strategy both internally and externally. Taking some advice from Fast Company about the nature of healthy and unhealthy business competition can also help organizations stay positive.
Competition within reason
There’s nothing wrong with rewarding top performers and having employees compete for recognition or prizes, as long as the engagements don’t become overwhelming and negatively influence attitudes, behavior and productivity. Too much contention in the office can eventually have negative impacts on a variety of work metrics, Fast Company said.
Competitions can reward those who respond well to such ventures but may not actually be much better at job tasks, making the long-term health of the business take a backseat to performance rivalries and challenges. Employees who do good work but aren’t as attuned to adversarial matchups may be minimized and, even worse, discouraged, hurting their output and the business as a whole.
Focusing on the positive results of interoffice competitions and not the negatives can help contests serve their intended purpose of benefiting the company. Recognize top performers but take care not to shame those who are on the lower end of the spectrum. Managers can also reward those who put effort into improving their skills outside of a designated rivalry.
Working together efficiently
Collaboration can help isolate and develop new ideas that help a company, as well as create a sense of community amongst staff and increase engagement. Working together also helps sharpen employee focus, Forbes reported.
Intense research and analysis are often best completed individually, but other tasks like developing client interaction strategies, deciding on a quarterly goal for a department or team and brainstorming sessions can all benefit from group work. Collaborative efforts should focus on areas where an increase in creativity and multiple perspectives are needed.
Even if employees aren’t physically near each other, using video conferencing and Internet-based seminar software can help bridge the gap.