It is the best of ideas. It is the worst of ideas

Creating competition between team members may sound like a good way of pushing people’s performance. However, it is more likely to hurt morale and fracture team cohesion. In this article, I will outline why competition in the workplace is usually a bad idea. Then, give examples of how it can, under certain circumstances, have a positive impact on teams.

Teams in the workplace function best when they work together. Competition undermines cooperation, which is the key to success. A competition creates a winner, which in turn implies losers. The losers are likely to be demotivated, and there will be more losers than winners.

For example, you decide to have a competition to see who can close the most bugs. Team members are now discouraged from helping others as that takes time from their own closing of issues and helps someone else increase their numbers. Moreover, if an engineer rushes to close a ticket and QA find that it is not fixed, the engineer has an incentive to claim it is a new defect and open a second ticket rather than reopening the original. They can now close two tickets, while messing with the accuracy of the company’s issue tracking system.

The problems with this type of competition are worse for technical teams than they would be for some other parts of the organization; sales teams, for example. Many of the metrics that are available for software teams are not direct measures of success. For sales teams, the number of sales made is a direct representation of what the team is intended to achieve. For software teams, metrics like velocity are not an independent measure of achievement.

Competition can be healthy and fun when it is not connected to work. For example, in a previous role, we had a month during which everyone on the team tracked their use of plastics. Every time someone discarded plastic, they contributed a dollar to the fund. At the end of the month, the winner was the person who had thrown away the least amount of plastic. The winner had bragging rights. We could have used some of the funds. collected as a prize, but 100% of it was donated to a suitable charity. The organizer sent out regular updates. I discovered that most of the plastic I discarded was a ring that sealed the metal lid to glass bottles of iced tea.

We would also have daily trivia at the end of stand-up. This provided a motivation to finish stand-up on time. We did not always have sufficient time for the questions, but it did help keep the team focused. The only thing that the winner received was kudos.

Have fun with competition at work, just keep it away from work-related activities and ensure that the prizes do not make those who fail to win feel like resentful losers.