Challenges can be a great way to get people to be more productive as similar to playing a friendly game of sports this often makes people want to work harder in order to win. For example, companies could have a simple sales challenge where the top performer for the month gets a bonus or prize which is very common. Why this got me thinking is I saw two companies recently who kind of have a similar goal of trying to encourage people to walk where one opted to have everyone try to gather as much people as possible and the group with the highest step counts would win. The other company limited the groups to only being able to have a certain amount of people and everyone group had a chance to at least win something even if they didn’t have the most steps overall.
Not surprisingly, the second company blew the other one out of the water in terms of engagement. Why was that? I think the obvious one was how the first one made it so that anyone with an established network of sort pretty much already won since they could recruit so many people to the point that all the smaller people didn’t even bother. Like the rich getting richer I guess you could say. Plus the fact that there wasn’t a guaranteed reward of sort for each group means you are probably only going to attract people who think they can win with certainty.
The first company reminds me of number crunchers where they simply base things out of data versus factoring in the human side of say competition. If you have a marathon where everyone is going to get something then that will likely attract more people to participate versus only the top three people getting rewarded as an example.