You want your employees to feel engaged with their jobs and their workplace overall, but that's no easy task. Creating an enjoyable environment where people feel they are a part of a community can go a long way in building this atmosphere.
Gamification has become an increasingly popular option in recent years for increasing employee engagement and motivation. In fact, 72 percent of employees report that games do motivate them to work harder at their jobs. In other words, not only do games help to create a positive atmosphere, but also they can help boost your bottom line.
We will walk you through fun contest ideas that you can use across various workplace settings, including employees both working in the office and remotely. Here is what you need to know about the top games and contests you can use to build your employee experience.
Why Have Employee Contests?
Employee contests can offer your small business a variety of different benefits that will help your overall work environment.
Provides Motivation
While employees want to perform their jobs well for various goals, such as climbing the company ladder, to name one, these goals can often feel a bit vague and hard to quantify. As mentioned above, providing a little gamification can motivate your team by inspiring a little healthy competition and provide them with an outlet for their competitive spirit. A motivational environment like this can build employee morale by helping them see what they can accomplish. If they win prizes for their performance, it can also help serve as a short-term motivator and encourage them to feel recognized for their efforts.
Promotes Team Building
You also want to encourage a sense of belonging and trust in the workplace. When your employees feel connected and work well together, they can naturally improve their productivity. Many gamification options can also serve as team building activities that encourage people to work directly with their co-workers. As they get to know each other and feel more comfortable together, they can carry this relationship over to their typical work assignments.
Increases Customer Satisfaction
When your team enters competitions that encourage them to do the best job possible, regardless of whether they will win an office lunch or a gift card, your customers will directly benefit from it. In addition, customer satisfaction will improve as your employees naturally boost their focus on meeting their customers' needs.
If you want to learn how employee contests can help your workplace, have a look at s few common contest ideas we explored that you can try.
Fun Contest Ideas for Your Workplace
As you begin to incorporate some gamification into the workplace, you will find that some of the activities work well on a business-wide scale for the entire team, and some focus on building your sales team members. We will offer some ideas for both types of contests and some prize ideas and giveaways that you can use to motivate your employees.
Contest Ideas for Any Department
These ideas can be used for professionals in any department, from your social media marketing manager to your accounting department.
- Scavenger hunt: A scavenger hunt game will award the first person to find or achieve a set list of items on their checklist. Depending on the department using this form of friendly competition, you might have items to check off such as "making a sale over a certain dollar amount." Or, you could create a variation that encourages people to answer certain puzzles about your company and then take a picture of themselves with something that represents the answer. This version encourages people to learn more about your organization, which can help build their relationship with the business.
- Trivia nights: Trivia game times can provide an excellent opportunity for team building games. You can group your employees to encourage them to work towards a common goal of answering the most questions correctly about topics such as:
- Your company
- Your customers
- Your city
- Your industry
- Anything else you can think of
You can quickly find a template that will help you organize your questions, and the winning team can be awarded prizes such as a lunch out on the company. Trivia depends upon teamwork, so it can help to build comradery among participants.
Designate a particular time, maybe an hour or two on a slow Friday afternoon, and bring everyone to the break room to divide into teams. Use a white board to record points and see just how fun this game can be. If your team works virtually, you can use web conferencing platforms to bring everyone together to play the game.
- Raffle tickets: Raffles also offer an excellent way to help keep employees motivated throughout the work day. You can have particular goals that are awarded with a certain number of raffle tickets. For example, someone who makes a new sale or writes a piece of content that sees a certain number of downloads can earn a particular number of raffle tickets throughout the week or month. In addition, you can have a regular drawing that offers people a chance to win prizes such as tickets to an enticing local event or a restaurant gift card.
- Icebreakers: Icebreakers can have a huge impact on your business in terms of making employees feel more comfortable establishing communication. In particular, you want people at your organization to feel comfortable with each other, especially when meeting with others for the first time. This can help bring new people on board or bring together team members who do not often meet.
Ice breakers can also be used for events such as webinars to help encourage people to start talking and get excited about the topic at hand. You can develop a list of fun questions related to your industry, location, or light current events-- such as the Olympics, a concert, or a local marathon. You can also have games such as "two truths and a lie" or asking people to rank superpowers. Again, the goal should be to nurture relationships and encourage conversation.
- Sports games: Sometimes, employees need opportunities to relax, and sports games can be just what they need. Having a company or department-wide March madness bracket can help to encourage camaraderie and give people something to enjoy while working.
Sales Contest Ideas
There are also a variety of sales contests that you can use to inspire your sales teams. Encouraging your team through a sales competition can help inspire people to meet new benchmarks and provide opportunities for employee recognition.
A number of different metrics can be used to evaluate your sales people to award. These metrics can recognize them based on their performance related to various sales process components; it does not always depend on a particular dollar amount. It is important as you build your sales competitions that you notice the other ways that sales representatives can benefit your business, such as upselling or convincing customers to renew their contracts. When possible, look for opportunities to note these achievements as well. Here are a few ideas to try.
- Sales bingo: Providing your sales reps with a bingo card can encourage them to hit particular types of deals. For example, you might have bingo squares for particular activities-- such as making 200 calls, deal sizes, or the length of the contract they get signed. As people meet the different benchmarks, they get to cross off the square, with the first person to bingo winning a prize.
- Top performers: A classic option includes noting the top sales performers at particular times. For example, you might evaluate the number of deals or the representative who generated the most revenue over a particular period of time, such as at the end of the month. This type of recognition encourages your employees to perform their best to achieve goals quickly and efficiently.
- Leave early on Friday: For this game, you want to set a group goal for your sales team, such as hitting a certain revenue target. If the team can reach that point before Friday afternoon, they all get to leave early.
Using Skynova to Note Your Finances
As you build your business and begin to incorporate some of these fun games into your work culture, you also want to pay attention to the importance of your accounting. Small business accounting can seem overwhelming to new business owners, but it doesn't have to be. Skynova has been designed for small business owners just like you, offering an intuitive platform and features that make it easy to track your income and your expenses.
With a platform like this, it becomes easy to see the impact of your team games on your customer success and your overall business growth. See how the increased sales numbers, higher customer retention, and better ratings for customer satisfaction can help your business continue to grow.
In addition to the accounting software itself, Skynova also offers a wealth of opportunities, such as a learning center and free templates that make it easy for business owners to manage tasks such as invoicing clients or sending quotes and estates.
As you look for ways to keep building your organization, see how Skynova can make the entire process easier for you.
Notice to the Reader
The content within this article is meant to be used as general guidelines and may not apply to your specific situation regarding employee engagement. Always consult with a professional accountant to ensure you're meeting accounting standards.