Conducting Profitable Staff Competitions

Staff competitions are a common occurrence in workplaces around the globe, however getting them right, so that they work for everyone involved, can be a tricky business. Employing the concept of staff competitions in your location can have multiple benefits for your employees and your establishment.

Benefits For Your Business

Inter-staff competitions can be used to promote new products, bringing them to your customers attention, or to help you shift some old stock that’s gathering dust and taking up space in your storeroom. Competitions can also be used to promote items which are close to their expiry date or those that you’re planning to remove from the menu. Competitions can also be used to promote seasonal or event dedicated items.

All of this helps to increase customer spend and promote your location. Increasing customer knowledge of new products is always necessary, whilst having a method to expedite clearing your shelves of extra stock allows you to bring in more of what your customers actually want.

Benefits For Your Employees

Competition sales can increase the value of a customers check, in turn increasing the size of the tip your employees receive. Furthermore, these competitions give your staff an incentive to practice and hone their up-selling abilities. Up-selling is a skill that requires tact, an understanding of the customer in front of you, and, sometimes, opportunism; all learnt through practice.

When To Run Competitions

There is no hard and fast rule for when or how often to offer these employee incentives, but they should not be too common an occurrence in your establishment. If your staff get used to them competitions can loose their novelty and your staff will lose interest. If your guests are being up-sold items all the time they could get turned away from returning because they feel your staff are too pushy.

Competition Length

The length of time for which you run these competitions is up to you. Some can be run just for a night and introduced on the “spur of the moment” in your pre-shift meeting, others can run for a week, two weeks, or a month. It all depends on the item you’re focusing on. An event based cocktail might only be a nightlong competition, but if you’re trying to shift some dead stock then it could run for a week or more, or until the bottles are empty!

Prizes Make Winners

What you offer as prizes can make or break your competitions as the prizes are why your employees are competing; if they don’t desire the prize then they simply won’t compete. Your prizes don’t always need to reflect the competition, for example, if half of your employees are not old enough to drink alcohol you can’t give it to them.

Prizes can range from money off their check when they come into your establishment, to deciding who get a specific holiday day off that everyone wants. You can get inventive with prizes, but make sure they’re items which will incentivise your staff to compete.

Tracking Competitions

You should place the scoreboard in an easily and regularly seen location; the whiteboard you use for pre-shifts is often an excellent spot. More often than not managers allow employees to mark and track their own sales in the competition. Usually employees will keep a hawks eye on each other to catch any cheating, and they’ll publicly announce every sale as they mark it, fuelling more competition and thus more sales. If you’re worried about cheats undermining your new sales incentive you can keep a secret eye on the sale of competition items by looking at individual POS reports.

Staff competitions can help to raise customer awareness of new items and help you to clear your  shelves of dead stock. They also add friendly competition to the workplace which will make working in your establishment even more enjoyable for your staff. If done right, you, your staff and your customers can receive benefits from these incentives.