Rewarding and engaging employees through online contests
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Nothing is more important to keeping your business competitive than having motivated employees. Your teams, your people, your human resources, are what keeps your business on its toes and allows it to grow and thrive. They know how things work, they’re the ones who speak to your customers and make sales, and they can see where things can be improved. You invest time and resources into helping your employees do their jobs to the best of their abilities, and a big piece of that puzzle that can often be forgotten about is employee engagement.
Do your teams know what’s expected of them? Do your teams enjoy coming into work or logging in and being a part of your culture? Are they aligned with the company’s values and mission? Do they feel rewarded for being so, or do they feel like a replaceable cog in a larger machine?
It can sometimes feel like you’re sentencing your employees to death by boring presentation or dry corporate memo – reams upon reams of verbiage and rhetoric that you can barely keep up with, let alone expect your teams to absorb alongside what they’re actually expected to do and complete as part of their contracted duties. This challenge takes on many new aspects if you’ve got people working remotely or on a hybrid work pattern. This is where gamification in the form of online contests and competitions can help.
Why create contests in the workplace?
Gamification is simply the application of game mechanics to non-gaming contexts to get better results, typically in an online context that mimics video games. Think about contests you’ve completed on social media to try and win prizes or discounts from brands you follow, or even questionnaires or longer form question-and-answer format experiences you’ve completed as part of hiring processes or work-based training. Games in the form of contests and competitions can be used to convey information, promote team unity, and encourage desired behaviours as effectively for human resources purposes as for marketing purposes. Instead of the boring presentations and dry corporate memos, you’re delivering your content in an interactive media format that can appeal and play off the innate desires for competition, co-operation, and discovery within your employees. You’re essentially using a fun activity as a way to engage and reward your employees.
There are many different types of online contests, and there are a variety of motivations to create and use them as a way to improve employee engagement across your business. They include, but are not limited to:
- Team building
- Virtual team building for remote working
- Fostering healthy competition to motivate performance
- To increase brand awareness internally
- Promote employee engagement by training and assessing their knowledge of company values
- To reward employees with fun experiences and activities, and opportunities to win prizes
In this article, we’ll run through 5 ideas for online contests and competitions you can create and use in the workplace to more effectively engage your teams.
Our top 5 workplace contest ideas
These contest ideas are all available as fully customisable game engines on the Drimify games creation platform. They can be tailored to suit your branding, your copy, your content, and your prizes to deliver a professionally produced experience to engage and reward your employees.
The key to running a successful contest, whatever its aim, lies in the details. If you want to use your contest or competition to reward your teams with a fun experience and an opportunity to win a prize, make that its mission, if you want to use your contest to help train your employees in a more rewarding and engaging way, make that the mission, try not to dilute an individual experience with too many ideas and objectives, as this could distract from the main reason you created an online contest in the first place. You should also plan carefully for how you want to distribute your contest to your teams. Will it be through LinkedIn? Will it be through Whatsapp? While all the experiences you can create on Drimify are easily integrated across different social media platforms, or even through QR codes, having a promotional plan (even internally) will help you be most effective in marketing and delivering it to your teams and getting them to engage with it.
Here are our top 5 contest and competition ideas to connect with and reward the people in your business, whatever channel you’re sharing it through, whether that’s email, or even through a WhatsApp group.
1. The Quiz: the most versatile contest format
Who doesn’t enjoy a quiz? And perhaps less often asked, what can’t a quiz be used for? It’s a question and answer format. It’s the format of the toughest academic and professional exams, but it’s also the format that packs out pubs and bars the world over and stokes everyone you’ve ever met to show their worth in a battle of trivia knowledge.
With that in mind, you could use the Quiz format on Drimify to create an interactive Quiz which you can distribute to your teams through any digital format you choose, either built around trivia for a fun experience or activity to try and win an internal prize, to test their knowledge of your company’s values, or to test their knowledge of some new key information they’ll need to know in order to effectively adapt to some new challenge.
Because it’s a digital format, it could be accessed by teams through their phones at work or a physical location through a QR code, or accessed remotely through a link in an email or even through social media depending on the nature of the content. You can construct the questions either in text, or you could use video or audio files to add extra elements to it – for example, having a music round if it was for a remote trivia Quiz – and you can make the answers multiple choice, ordered by values, or even open: allowing them to write their answer in their own words if it requires justification or more creativity. The possibilities with a Quiz are endless, and they can be customised around almost any contest ideas you may have.
2. A Photo Contest or Video Contest to foster creativity and team building
The format of both the Photo Contest and the Video Contest game engines are identical. Players take photos or videos, caption them, and submit them, and then you, the creator of the competition, can approve submissions to appear in the Voting Gallery for your teams to vote on the winning entry.
You can create any brief for this contest that you like – maybe it could be asking teams to submit creative visual merchandising displays for a campaign, or if you have team members working as field operatives on comparable projects, it could be to submit compelling or interesting photos or videos of their projects in action. This sort of approach is a great way to encourage your teams to put their best efforts into their work to compete, but also, to help share ideas and promote interaction. It could be part of the copy in the voting gallery that you encourage your teams to reach out to creators of the entries they were especially impressed with to promote interdepartmental cooperation.
Of course, it’s important to introduce some sort of prize, as while your teams may well be motivated to do their best work, and many will be quite happy to show off their creative side, some will need that extra incentive to enter into the spirit of the competition. Perhaps the team who created the winning entry would get a celebratory meal on the company, or even win some sort of experience – the prize ultimately shouldn’t distract from the main aim of the competition, or be so monumentally out of proportion that encourages cheating or tactical voting to end as the winner.
3. Use the physical space available in your office to create a series of onboarding contests for new employees
You can use the Dynamic Path™ format on the Drimify platform to create multi-level, playable experiences which can either be unlocked sequentially, by date, or by scanning QR codes – the latter allowing you to create an experience for your employees that will take them around your premises.
By issuing clues which when solved lead to locations, new recruits could take part in a sort of experiential training contest. Solve clue A, unlock contest A, solve clue B, unlock contest B. You could even pair up new recruits or create small teams if you’re onboarding on a large scale. This creates a labour efficient and fun way for them to learn their way around your site, and you can use branded Quizzes as well as other competitive games to help test and reinforce what they’ve learned through their inductions, and include spot prizes to add that extra kick of excitement to the experience.
4. Sports games as part of your company culture
This might seem like an odd idea, but think about: The Rugby World Cup, the Football World Cup, the FA Cup Final, the Super Bowl – these are events that unite and excite people on a large scale. If you’re working in a large business, you can bet good money that a large portion of your employees are sports fans who care about the big events. If you’re a large company focused on a specific location you can bet good money that a fair proportion of your employees all support the same team. Think about the legions of local fans swarming the streets when the local team wins the league and brings the trophy home.
The Drimify games creation platform already features customisable game engines for basketball, American football, football (or soccer if you must), and rugby, with plans to add more sports in time – introducing an opportunity to play through a penalty shootout for a chance to win a prize with the morning emails can show your teams the the company reflects their culture. The vibe is very much, “Our team’s going to win, and so will one of you,” or even have a few winners, and activate the leaderboard function to create some inter-office banter and competition. Maybe the big prize is two tickets to the big game, or even a hospitality suite experience?
5. Use the Dynamic Path™ format to create a series of contests as part of a specific event or internal promotion
The Dynamic Path™ format can be used as a sort of digital experiences calendar. The multi-step nature of the Dynamic Path™ engine is used every year to make Advent Calendars of game experiences for marketing purposes, and could be used in the same way to deliver a series of contests to your employees in the run up to Christmas or some other holiday or significant event – maybe a 50th anniversary of the company or some other milestone.
The idea is that you’re creating festivities and excitement, and rewarding your employees for their hard work and contributions to the company after releasing a new flagship product, or reaching a certain number of downloads, or some other major achievement. It’s delivering diversion and excitement and rewards, and showing your people that there’s always something exciting happening when they’re part of your organisation. Remember, teams that play together, stay together.
Use online contests year-round for the best results
It is also important to note that it’s best practice to create and use online contests and competitions year-round, and make it a part of your internal communications strategy. Contests created on Drimify allow you to monitor various KPIs to see how effective an experience or activity is proving, so while you will have the tools to deliver on your contest aims, you will definitely be able to improve based on the feedback and data you’ll collect over time.
It’s also just a great way to consistently deliver on being an engaging and rewarding place for people to work, whether that’s with a physical premises or through remote working. Not every contest or competition will appeal to 100% of your teams, but over time, with repeated practice and analysis of the data, you’ll learn how to appeal to a broader cross-section of your internal audience over different types of experiences.
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