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2014 is coming to a close but there is an energy in the air that your team is most likely tapping into on a daily basis. With the onslaught of holiday deals, online ads and even the nostalgia that everybody feels there is no better time to leverage this feeling to drive productivity. The secret is to develop a recognition campaign that utilizes the season (Holidays & New Years) in a quantifiable way that will affect your organization's core objectives. This can be done by creating a holiday themed contest which is displayed publicly and rewards the winner(s) for achieving your business goals.

Create a Contest (with a Smart Goal)

Creating a holiday-themed contest is a great way to engage your employees during this time of the year. If you tie in the contest with a financial or productivity quota then you have fused the two necessary elements that drive team motivation. The important thing to remember about setting a goal for the contest is that you define it as clearly as possible (SMART Goal) and have a method by which everybody clearly understands the end result. You can do this by writing a short one page description of the contest and distributing it to your team OR use an integrated contest tool like CrewHu to help keep everyone on the same page.

Make Progress/Ranking Public

One of the biggest reasons why employee engagement contests fall short in the workplace is the lack of real time results. Using a leaderboard that ranks your whole team by their progress in a way that they can see their own results embedded upon everybody else's results. Displaying progress publicly is a huge factor in contest buy-in and shows that you care about making results transparent, dynamic, immediate and readily available. 

Creating a contest that ties in productivity oriented activities and assigns points is an easy way that you can create a quantifiable system that the whole team can observe and emulate. Decide on the core 3 activities you want your employees to exhibit and give them a score of 10 points everytime they display that behavior. Keeping track of the points should be a high focus for you on the leaderboard. 

You can buy a whiteboard, some markers and star shaped stickers and hang it up on a wall with daily updates to enact this strategy OR use a digital solution like the CrewHu Contest leaderboard and Social Cafe to deliver updates straight to your employees mobile phones.

Reward Winner and Participants for Achieving Goal

It is crucial early on that you establish the reward(s) that your team is trying to win. Setting up a Grand Prize of $100 or more helps smaller organizations  while multiple rewards (1st, 2nd and 3rd) helps leverage teams with more employees. Giving a symbolic gift to everyone who participated and achieved a minimum requirement goal is also a good idea as it allows everyone to feel they could take something home regardless of not placing as a primary winner. CrewHu allows participants in the contest to redeem their points in an online store pre-setup with gift cards by Amazon, Starbucks and other preferred companies. A cool feature of the CrewHu Store is that you can even create a custom reward that aligns with your organization's culture and goals.

Conclusion

Invest time in your contest ideas for work. Your employes are watching your every step, listening to your every phrase and can easily detect if you are not putting in the effort. They will put the same amount of effort in return through their decisions to engage. Creating a holiday themed contest that is clear, public and quantifiable shows that you are thinking of both your business and them and will help you drive productivity right through the end of December and into 2015. Ready to define your SMART Goal for your team? Click below and start engaging!