Guide to hosting successful

Theme: Competition
You found our guide to hosting successful work competitions.
“But Angela,” you may say, “I read an article on Forbes that said workplace competition can be harmful.”
Yes, workplace competition, as in, a Hunger Games style survival of the fittest, can create an adrenaline-driven environment that exhausts employees. However, friendly workplace competitions can have the opposite effect. As the Forbes article mentioned, “cooperative competition” can bolster teamwork instead of destroying it. Office contests can re-energize and motivate the workforce. These contests channel ambition into higher productivity and teamwork.
Workplace contests are an example of employee engagement ideas, competitive team building, team building challenges, and morale boosters at work. These competitions are similar to office challenges.
This article includes:

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  work competition games
  
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  contest ideas for work
  
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  employee engagement contest ideas
  
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  contest prize ideas for work
  
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  fun contest ideas for work
  
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Here we go.
What are workplace competitions?
Workplace competitions are friendly contests between coworkers. These competitions foster camaraderie, raise motivation, and often improve the overall work environment. Contests can gamify processes like sales, customer satisfaction, quality assurance, and make work fun. These competitions can also establish common ground and bring groups closer together.
List of work competition games
From Workplace Safety Bingo to Virtual Hackathons, here is a list of fun contest ideas for work that will motivate and delight your staff.
1. Workplace Safety Bingo
Workplace safety competitions condition employees to be safer and more mindful on the job. Safety might not seem like an especially exciting workplace competition theme, but you can gamify the challenge by instituting a game of Workplace Safety Bingo.
Workplace Safety Bingo cards contain safety-friendly actions such as “restocked first aid cabinet,” or “cleaned up a spill.” To simplify your game, we created a template you can use.
Each employee receives a card. The employee will carry the card at all times, and mark off a square upon completing a corresponding action. To ensure all parties play by the rules, require players to take photo or video evidence of the act. When an employee marks off five consecutive squares, the teammate can trade the card for a small prize, such as a snack stash or piece of company swag. To encourage participation, offer a larger prize like a tablet or team building lunch to the department with the most completed cards, or to a card chosen from an office raffle at random.
2. Online Office Games (Hosted)
If you need fun workplace competition games to spice up your virtual office, then look no farther than Online Office Games. The event is an online Office Olympics consisting of trivia, scavenger hunts, icebreakers, and virtual team building games, such as “Can you hear me now?” The challenges bring out coworkers’ competitive spirit while still inspiring cooperation, teamwork, and group bonding. A fun and fair-minded member of the TeamBuilding crew guides the games, meaning you do not need to play referee while your colleagues duke it out for ultimate bragging rights and hypothetical gold medals.
Learn more about Online Office Games or hosting your own office Olympics or online office Olympics.
3. Virtual Team Trivia
Virtual Team Trivia is one of the most entertaining workplace competitions you could hold with your remote teams. When you book, choose from a list of subjects like international or Rock n’ Roll, or opt for a customizable theme. A guide will research and write clever and challenging trivia questions and clues that are sure to tickle your teammates’ intellects. Over the course of an hour, you and your crew compete against other organizational teams to determine who possesses the most semi-useless knowledge. Virtual Team Trivia is a great way for distant teams to connect and show what they know. Plus, the universe contains so much random information that you can never exhaust all potential topics, meaning trivia can become a regular online team building event.
Learn more about Virtual Team Trivia.
4. Virtual Hackathon
Hackathons are marathon competitions where teams compete to sketch a new product or idea within a set amount of time, typically one weekend. Your company can host an internal virtual hackathon that pairs the thrill of innovation with the comforts of working from home. Online hackathons are one of the most intense and exciting work from home contest ideas.
To host a virtual hackathon, first pick a theme, such as sustainability, pop culture, or straight out of sci-fi. To ensure no participants begin work early, it helps to pick a specific prompt and only reveal the exact challenge at the start of the competition.
Next, advertise the event within your organization and drum up interest. You will want to ensure that you have the tools teams need to collaborate, such as online communication platforms, digital whiteboards, and video meeting software. When the hackathon begins, announce the challenge and send teams to work. To make the event more fun and interactive, check in on teams periodically, and run short online games for team building to encourage interaction. Once time expires, all participants will reconvene to present finished products, at which point judges will pick a winner and award a prize.
5. Hotshot Snapshot
Companies often host contests where employees submit photos for a chance to win a prize. Typically, participants do not see competitors’ photos until judges reveal a winner, or at least until the contest closes and audiences must vote on a winner. One of the more creative photo contest ideas for employees is to host an ongoing competition with no limits on entries, where participants can see submissions in real time. Hotshot snapshot is such a contest.
To host the competition, first choose a theme, such as hometown pride, office couture, or flash forward to the future. Next, invite employees to post photos on social media, either to a private group, or in public using a special contest hashtag. Participants can view the other entries and up the ante to share an even better picture. You can award prizes to the photographers who garner the most number of likes on all photos or the most likes on one picture.
6. Costume Contest
Chances are, your colleagues either arrive to work in uniform or business casual attire. If your office has a lax policy, then your cubicle mates may rock a T-shirt. Or, if you work from home, then no pants is no problem. Whatever the day-to-day dress code, most employees would jump at the opportunity to play dress up.
Costume contests are one of the most popular employee engagement contest ideas. Our sister company, Museum Hack, holds one every year, and employees do not disappoint. Costume contests flex employees’ creativity and fashion sense, and are a great way to add whimsy and fun to remote and in-person workplaces.
List of company costume contest ideas:

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  Celebrity sightings around the office
  
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  If fictional characters worked for our company
  
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  Twinning with my work best friend
  
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  Office supplies disguise (You can check out Duck Tape’s Stuck At Prom contest gallery for inspiration.)
  

Your contest can also be industry specific. For instance, an advertising agency might embody classic ads, while urban planners might dress up as favorite cities. Museum Hack recreates famous pieces of art. At the end of the day, your costume contest theme does not need to be work-related at all, though. You can choose any topic that spurs staff.
As an added bonus, you can repurpose the entries into content for a company blog entry or social media posts.
For more tips, check out our guide to virtual costume contests.
7. Around the world in 80 workdays
Step-counting contests are one of the most common workplace fitness competitions. You can put a new spin on the classic by turning the contest into a race around the world. First, get a map of the globe, either paper or digital. For the game to work, you will need to convert steps into miles. The average mile contains about 2,000 steps. If you want to be literal, then you can use a local map to track the literal distance. Otherwise, we suggest using a 1 step to 1 mile ratio. Every week, participants submit step counts, and you will update the map to show where on the globe each racer sits. For extra fun, show each player in vessels such as hot air balloons, pirate ships, or flying saucers. The race can last as long as you like, but we recommend one to three months.
8. Deck-a-desk
The most natural workplace decoration competition is to prompt employees to bling out their desks. Deck-a-desk is a desk decorating contest that challenges employees to transform personal workspaces into works for art. To host a contest, merely choose a theme, set a budget, and let employees get creative.