All is Fair in War or How to Motivate Employees for Efficient Work

Eventually the question of motivating employees appears in front of every employer. In this moment there emerge several questions, which requires clear answers: how to make employees work harder and more efficient? What kind of tricks have to be implemented in a company in order to receive better results from company activity? The experience of international freelance marketplace for linguists 2Polyglot will show how the company implemented competition between its departments.

Primary goals of the competition were:

·        To define the most efficient way of traffic attraction for short-time period;

·        Service promotion;

·        Renew employees’ energy in summer while everybody is dreaming about vacation and the sea;

·        Increase website traffic.

All employees were divided into three groups according to their positions:

·     SMM (2 persons);

·     SEO (5 persons);

·     PR (4 persons).

Unique links with UTM marks were created for each group. Therefore, it was possible to follow total amount of clicks in Google Analytics.

As for the term, this competition has lasted less than a month from July, the 7-th till August, the 3-rd.

Departments were supposed to use their “special” tools for attracting visitors to the site, but each team had its own tactics and used everything what was necessary.

 Social media team used usual ways of promotion: everyday posts of 2Polyglot public pages in such social networks as Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Vkontakte, Pinterest, Tumbler, comments on similar pages and adding new friends. Of course, this all was accompanied with unique links with marks. As a result, significant flow of visitors every day on the site. Social media advertising did not count.

Employees of this department attracted new visitors due to posting articles, infographics and press-releases with the help of paid or free resources. Furthermore, there were also actively used social networks, as colleagues posted comments with links in different topic-related groups. In that moment paid advertising of the website has not been launched yet, that is why toolkit was limited for SEO specialists.

PR managers posted free articles on different portals on various topics with their unique link. But the thing is that many websites do not allow any kind of links in published articles and that was a pretty significant obstacle for this department. Sometimes PR cooperated with SMM specialists (i.e. asked them for sharing published articles in public pages and groups) and any misunderstanding was not recognized. Furthermore, during competition there was launched mass emails sending, which is under jurisdiction of PR-department) and it also gave some quantity of visits.

Trickeries are also fair…

It should also be mentioned that the competition was not ended without tricks from some participants. There were attempts  to use nonstandard methods in all teams including cunning ones. For example, one of employees was asked to compose press-release for SEO team, but he has added his own link to the text having decided to make a profit from the situation. SEO specialists did not recognize it and launched paid press-release mass sending. Therefore, they gave to competitors additional traffic due to own inattentiveness. This situation demonstrates the presence of passion in one big team where all participants work for one project. All is fair in war.

After conclusion every participant of teams put particular small sum of funds into the “bank”. Total amount of money was the price for the winners. No employee lost a lot, but the prime inspired winners for further success.

Consequences of the competition

At first, new website visitors. During the competition, the total amount of visitors increased almost triple. As a result, SMM team won, which had attracted more visitors than two other departments had together. It is necessary to add that such effect is objective and true for short time period.

At second, visitors attraction mechanism. As it was concluded, the most efficient tool had occurred to be sharing information via social media. Due to correct work of SMM results may exceed the expectations.

At third, participants’ impressions. It is possible to confirm that both sides of the competition winners and losers were satisfied. The event occurred to be interesting and inspired employees in lazy summer season.

Anyway, we realized that such events can be very useful for motivation to work harder and that leads to more successful project promotion, in this case this is 2Polyglot.