Leveraging the Competitive Instinct in Your Employees

Human beings – including your employees – are naturally competitive. Millions of years of evolution have drummed into our brains that those who strive harder will get the food, shelter and a greater opportunity to pass on DNA. We’re psychologically rewarded for winning and now you can leverage competition in your company to motivate employees.

In the corporate environment, this competitive instinct is a two-edged sword. Yes, it’s essential to motivate employees to achieve at their highest level. But competitiveness more strongly motivates individual success than corporate success. At its worse, it can cause stress and tension between employees, and the pursuit of individual goals at the expense of the company mission.

Channel the competition for corporate success

It’s up to you to channel the competitive instinct in directions that benefit your company.

RealPage’s EasyLMS is generally described as a learning management system. That is, its core purpose is imparting knowledge and skills to employees. What is less understood is that EasyLMS is also a motivational tool designed to channel the competitive instinct in directions that benefit the company as a whole in addition to furthering your employees’ personal objectives.

Motivate employees with gamification

EasyLMS incorporates “gamification” to reward desired activities. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, gamification taps into the same drive that has made us love winning since we were children. It’s been a real sensation in the corporate world, because it is proving to make jobs more enjoyable while motivating employees to pursue what in EasyLMS are referred to as “achievements.” It’s been shown that these rewards do not have to be tangible: they can be as simple as virtual “badges” kept in a “trophy case.” That’s not surprising, considering there are people who stay awake for days on end simply to rack up high scores in video games. Again, it’s not just what we win that matters – it’s winning itself.

What EasyLMS provides is a systematic way for employees to track the pursuit of goals (knowledge or achievements) that have been set for them, and for their managers to monitor who is achieving what and give prods or props where appropriate. Without such a system, learning and on-the-job achievements tend to follow haphazard courses, and employees don’t get that all-important sense of where they stand in relation to others (tapping into their competitiveness).

Sample achievements to be rewarded might include:

• Number of signed leases achieved by leasing agents
• Number of work orders completed by maintenance teams
• Courses completed toward learning of new skills
• Completion of performance reviews
• Positive property reviews and “likes” on social media
• Percentage of residents using resident portal, online payments or other solutions
• Percentage of residents with renters insurance
• Completion of community service activities

Some of these, you probably noted, are things employees tend to put on a back burner. Gamification and achievements give them the motivation to get them done.

Learning management remains the chief function of EasyLMS. But don’t discount its value as a tool for motivating and rewarding all sorts of activities that benefit your company. Competition can be fun, and it can be the fuel for getting the most out of your most important resource: your people.