Encouraging competition among security guard teams on one hand can be motivating for them to perform at the best abilities, boosting productivity. On the other hand, it can also lead to bitterness or rivalries among team members, giving rise to discouragement. Cultivating competitions among security guard teams is, therefore, considered a high-risk strategy but also essential.
If you want to implement this strategy effectively in your security guard company to reap maximum benefits, here are a few ways, tried and tested, to cultivate healthy competition for you to strike the right tone effortlessly.
Pick The Right People
Hiring the right security guard can be a challenge. The reason being, there are dozens of applicants competing for a single position.
Selecting the best one among them can be difficult. Though, remember hiring the most competitive guard for your security guard teams isn’t exactly the goal here.
Yet zero in on the applicants who seek out the competition – they might turn out to be your greatest future employees.
Use The Rewarding System
When everyone’s competing to win, you must ensure the rewards to be awarded to the security guards should remain reasonable. Those rewards must make sense, given the context of the competition.
In some cases, it might just be appropriate to reward the winners with a silly trophy that identifies them as the winner. But sometimes, a more tangible reward may be appropriate, such as letting them leave early on a particular day or a bonus.
Reward Teamwork
When security guard team members work together, they often achieve much more than a security guard can achieve on his own.
However, the problem with fostering competition among security guard teams is that it can sometimes derail the importance of teamwork.
It is important to encourage an attitude of teamswork first within your security guard company. Even when everyone is competing against each other, they must not forget the bigger picture and work towards it as a whole.
Recognize Best Performers
Promoting teamwork is great, but it is also crucial to encourage those who stand out from the best.
If you are going to reward everyone the same way, it will create an environment where security guards will be tempted to simply do the minimum of what is required of them.
Giving rewards to the top performers will actually help foster teamwork, encouraging others to learn from what the top-performing security guards are doing right.
Establish Clear Goals
When it comes to cultivating healthy competition in your security guard company, the competition must be focused in the right direction. How?
Make sure that there are a clear set of goals for all your security guard teams to work towards. Without it, your security guard teams are going to lose focus. They will start spending their time and energy on the wrong things.
At the end of the day, don’t forget to review their progress. Regularly reviewing it will make sure you and your security guard teams are on the right track.
Discourage Unhealthy Behaviour
If your security guards step out of line and start acting in an unethical way in the quest to win the competition, well, there need to be clear and fairly enforced consequences.
In order to do that right from the beginning, make sure to let them know they will only be rewarded if the security guard teams win fair and square.
Do not forget to convey that any unethical ways to win the competition will not be tolerated.
Give Honest Feedback
Know that your security guards will need both rewards as well as consequences to perform well. But what else they will need to do is honest feedback.
Telling the security guards when they do well or miss the mark is the greatest gift that you can give them, which will also help enhance their performance.
Encourage Open Communication
One of the first key steps toward encouraging healthy competition in your security guard company is to create a work environment that promotes open communication.
Not only are the security guards encouraged to share their opinions, but it is also important that the security managers show them that their opinions are valued. Thus, encouraging the guards to speak freely and respectfully.
Promote Healthy Conflict Resolution
Many security guard companies are afraid of conflict in the workplace because they fear it will ruin the company’s environment, leading to a toxic work culture.
However, understand the fact that conflict is inevitable, especially when decisions need to be made that will determine the company’s success.
That’s why, instead of trying to suppress disagreements, you should instead focus on developing a healthier approach to conflicts so that when they do occur, they help lead to the best resolutions possible.
Don’t Force It
It’s important to understand and embrace the fact at the end of the day that workplace competition simply may not be for all your security guard teams.
Since every security guard team comprises a diverse range of individuals, it’s entirely not possible that it might not work out.
One way to figure out whether or not competition will be successful is to understand the personality of each of your guards.
So, how would you encourage healthy competition among security guard teams?
