Competition is a strange beast – it can bring out the very best in people and it can cause teams to gel better than they ever have. Something about having a challenge thrown out with the potential to feel superior really gets people motivated. Sadly, there is a trend to try and use this motivation in the workplace by having awards and competitions between work mates. Instead of bringing the team together though, these competitions tear it apart because now the aim is to be superior to your work mates instead of working with your work mates to be superior over someone else.

A while back Ephox started setting aside one Friday afternoon a fortnight for the engineers to have a “Creative Coding Afternoon”. The aim was to get the engineers playing around with our products from a user’s point of view and thinking of cool ideas that anyone could implement, then develop a prototype in about 3 hours to be shown to the team. We’ve seen some really cool stuff come out of these afternoons already, but we’ve also seen some problems. When the idea was first conceived it was decided that to motivate people to do really cool stuff, the afternoon would be a competition with a small prize for whoever came up with the “best” thing. The prize was just a silly desk toy worth about $5, but just the thrill of winning got people working hard and trying to come up with really creative new things to build onto our products.

The problem we had though was that people tended to keep their ideas secret so that no one would steal them and work feverishly away on them by themselves. Many ideas got to the point of being really cool but just needing a few more hours polish to make them actually useful on our internal systems, but no one wanted to go back and finish them off because the buzz had gone out of that idea and it wasn’t going to win.

The competition had actually caused the team to split up into individuals instead of working together as a team to improve ideas and give pointers on how best to achieve something. People were even hesitant to ask others for help because it didn’t seem fair to interrupt them and reduce their chances of winning. Then for a few weeks we didn’t have prizes and all of a sudden ideas were shared around, more risky ideas were attempted even though there might not have been time to get them demoable and people tended to help each other out more. Some of the coolest and most polished projects we’ve had came out of these weeks because the whole team contributed ideas to the projects to make them the best they could be.

We still broke up into individuals or pairs to work on the projects, just so that we get a break from each other1, but the projects were discussed together before hand to work out who wanted to work on what and questions and suggestions were far more common as we worked. The end result tended to be more polished too, one of the projects has been sent to a couple of clients who have customized them a little and put them into production.

Next time someone suggests a competition, I think I’ll look for ways to make it cooperative instead – we’ll get more out of the team that way.

1 – pairing all day every day can get pretty tiring↩