Organising a Contest for Employees
According to “Motivating the Middle 80% With Contests”, the top performers always win.
However, you can use contests to motivate your main body of employees and increase their attention on important company activities or goals in short bursts as well. In other words, don’t miss your chance to become a top performer, or at least learn how to do that with Judgify’s online system for organising contests for employees.
Reasons for and goals of contests for employees
Workplace contests should be a part of your event marketing strategy simply because contests are a great tool for building your fan base. They also allow you to engage your audience in a variety of ways and increase conversion. What’s most important is that contests are a great source of data that can empower your users to do your marketing for you!
Why is it important to reward employees?
Obviously, there are no contests without winners, and there are no winners without prizes. There should be a certain motivation clearly included in your contest rules as well as ways to achieve it in your terms and conditions. Forbes defines the three key reasons why it is important to reward your employees:
- Recognised employees are happy ones.
- Appreciated leaders are appreciative.
- When employees feel recognised, they stick around.
“When employees and their work are valued, their satisfaction and productivity rises, and they are motivated to maintain or improve their good work. Praise and recognition are essential to an outstanding workplace. People want to be respected and valued by others for their contribution.” (Cuttingedgepr Blog)
Needless to say, employee motivation contests are important for business success.
Types of employee contests
When organising workplace contests, you may come across a variety of creative contest forms and genres. The most popular are as follows:
Direct: These company contests for employees tend to reward participants each time they complete a specific task or goal. They enable individuals to feel as if they are truly progressing in doing their jobs.
Collective: Such contests for employee motivation bring all the team members together to achieve a certain mutual goal within a certain period of time. You are fostering team spirit and employees’ intrinsic motivations of belonging to a group by running such contests.
Races: You may also organise highly competitive contests that incite participants to reach the finish line (goal) first, either as a team player or an individual. As a manager, use races to kick-start new cycles of sales and other initiatives or to finally put an end to project crunches.
Records: This contest type is the most exciting and entertaining variety as it encourages participants to make as many actions as possible in a strictly defined timeframe. The person who makes the most is the winner.
To spice things up, learn how to create employee contests based on a chosen type. This will significantly add to your event success.
A step-by-step guide on how to organise a contest for employees
Before you start a workplace contest, be sure to familiarize yourself with local regulations and restrictions, if any. Remember that every state has its own social media and other contest laws—and some of them can be tricky! Do thorough research to make sure your internal contest for employee promotion is legal. Study the rules for workplace contest organisation:
- Know your target market and goals.
You’re probably sick and tired of this phrase, but to run a successful contest, you need to know your goals and the target audience. There may be a massive range of goals, depending on your business:
- Drive more traffic to your website
- Create or increase the buzz around your brand
- Increase social media buzz around a new product line
- Extend your email base
- Generate new email leads
- Form a community
- Build customer relationships/deliver brand values
- Generate immediate sales
- Create user-generated content (photo/essay/video contests)
- Broaden popular product insights
Clearly, your goals should be set before the contest launch.
- Choose your contest type, rules, terms and conditions, and prizes for employee contests.
The above considerations represent your contest mechanics, which is half the work if you do it properly!
- Create your contest.
For this, you will need a professional awards management system. Set up your contest event details and easily create entrants and submissions forms. Modern awards management software allows you to run any type of contest without any special coding skills.
- Market your contest.
Based on your goals and target audience, establish a marketing mix of channels and tools you’re going to use to reach and involve your audience. Yes, you are organising the contest for employees, but you should still “sell” them the contest idea by coming up with the right promotional plan and engaging creative ideas.
5. Monitor results and follow up after the contest.
To make the most out of your contest, apply awards management apps to organise the workflow, track changes automatically, see the reports, and pick the winners. Form a community of people engaged through your contests, and don’t forget to announce the winners at the corporate event. You currently have a great tool in your hands to award and inspire your employees by organising a great corporate awards ceremony.
How to set up contest rules and create contest criteria
To help you establish the contest rules and awards criteria that complement the mission of your organisation, we offer this simple five-step guide:
- Organise an internal company committee that will develop the awards program. Ideally, these people work within the company and understand its values, strengths, weaknesses, goals, etc.
- Organise a survey to tap into employee expectations. How do they want to be awarded? What’s the best award trophy for them? Provide questions that will help create inspiring incentives for the staff.
- Align those expectations with strategic goals. The wants and needs of your employees don’t always match with the company goals. While getting into the objectives of the team, you should ensure that the company objectives resonate with the company’s mission. Employee motivation is for organisation functions and grows as well.
- Create and apply the awards criteria based on their KPIs and goals.
Ensure there’s a perfect understanding of judging criteria in all teams. You should create clear instructions that explain the rules and criteria in detail. For this, use Judgify’s help.
Contest ideas on how to reward your employees
How do you reward your employees? That’s an important question to answer. Use our awards trophy ideas and the instructions below for some insight.
Have teams compete with other teams in a game form. You should gamify your contests strategically.
The point of your contest is not just for people to be entertained or increase engagement. According to numerous experts, game-like workplace competitions help employees solve new problems more effectively. It also increases their individual motivation and contributions, leading to greater team loyalty.
Create multiple ways to win.
It is recommended that you vary the contests and rules when organising employee contests. Online event management apps allow for optimisation of the process while still leaving a lot of space for creativity. Hold a proper kickoff and update the results frequently.
Measure activities
Go to the advanced scoring and reporting page to see the advantages of your contest measurements, analyse and report the contest outcomes, and more. Again, with the help of an event management app, hit your contest reset every month or two, monitor the results, update the data, and gather feedback any time you need it. Apply activity metrics and the results in your ongoing marketing strategy.
Provide creative prizes
There are tons of worthy awards to choose from. While cash is always a good motivator, it isn’t always practical or even allowed, so go ahead and unleash your imagination in choosing alternative incentives. Be sure to include the prize description in your terms and conditions as a centralized source of information that employees can refer to and access easily.
Use contest ideas for employees
Look up some useful contest ideas on our blog or on any other relevant resource for event management and marketing. Be sure to apply the top creative ideas in your contest to succeed, and visit our resources center for real cases. Get creative, and work to understand what types of contests your team will respond to best.
Conclusion
Event organisers should conduct a creative contest for employees for many reasons. Business owners know that motivated employees are the major contributors to both team and company success. They look for help in organising contests that can spark energy and fuel the workers’ competitive spirit, either in house or outdoors, while also motivating employees to contribute more.
Contact us any time you need fresh ideas, and we also welcome your own contest ideas! Leave your best suggestions in the comments below.