How to Inspire a High Performance Workplace with Leaderboards

How to define, create, and sustain a high-performance workplace according to culture

“A lot of players think the game is all about individual performances when it’s really all about a team game.” – Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

What could a basketball player, especially one recognized so much for his personal accomplishments, know about a high-performance workplace?

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is one of the most legendary basketball players of all time. Over a 20-year career in the National Basketball Association (NBA), Abdul-Jabbar was Rookie of the Year, a member of six championship teams, a six-time MVP, two-time scoring champion, and a 19-time All-Star. He holds the record for the most points scored in NBA history, with a total 38,387 points. Retiring from the NBA in 1989 hasn’t slowed him down, either. He is the author of 15 books, a sought-after public speaker, an award-winning columnist, and the recipient of The Presidential Medal of Freedom.

If there is anyone who could claim that individual performance is more important than a team working together to craft a high-performance workplace, it would be Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. And yet, he specifically points out that a team, working as a unit, is the most critical part of winning.

Turn your team into champions. Get the friendly competition going with a leaderboard and social media wall and watch the wins pile up. Start your leaderboard today.

From the court to the conference room: Designing the perfect high-performance workplace

To create a superior team, whether it’s in sales, social, or any number of other roles, start finding ways to create a high-performance workplace while keeping happy employees.

How can a leaderboard help with that? Author Ralph Marston writes that you should never “lower your expectations to meet your performance. Raise your level of performance to meet your expectations.” You could also go with the colloquialism that a rising tide lifts all boats. The point is that, a leaderboard can inspire your entire team.

Competition is infectious. When you set up a leaderboard to reflect team or individual performance, a little bit of friendly competition can motivate almost anyone.

How to use leaderboards to promote a high-performance workplace

1. Start with the right metrics

Metrics can be helpful. They can also be harmful. For instance, in sales, if your leaderboard only reflects the top-grossing salespeople, that leaves out a lot of other important metrics that are helpful to your overall business, such as customer retention or customer satisfaction, and it can highlight inequalities within teams (better shifts or higher-income clients, for instance.)

Instead of, or at least in addition to, sales numbers, you could let your leaderboard reflect the quality of work that your team is doing. Who’s making the most calls? Who is backing up everyone in a pinch? Who is getting all their assignments in on time?

Everwall’s leaderboard functionality encourages team-building by showing the most engaged social media users. If you’re asking your team to be more involved in the brand-building of your organization or event, our leaderboard would help you see and reward employees who are most active using your designated hashtags, and mentioning your company.

2. Include the entire team

Employees who never show up on the leaderboard might not be trying very hard, or they might be up against more engaged posters. What can you do to encourage those employees who put in the effort, but aren’t ready to share?

Approach them from the perspective of personal goals – and get them on your leaderboard. One example would be to mention them in your posts. An example might be an editor who wrote a feature article for your blog, but they haven’t shared it themselves yet. If they’re not at the top of the leaderboard that day for promoting their article, that’s pretty embarrassing. For other types of leaderboards: who had the highest percentage increase in returned sales calls? Which team presentation had the most positive feedback?

At the risk of sounding like a motivational speaker, can we all agree that an engaged team is the embodiment of a high-performance workplace? In that context, a leaderboard can help build comradery. As more engaged team members show up on the leaderboards around the office, that spirit of friendly competition kicks in, and more people will participate. Engaging with one another can bring a team closer.

3. Remember that quantity does not equal quality

A high-performance workplace does not mean a workplace where people are working 12-hour days and coming in on days off to finish projects. That could be a high-performance workplace, but performance includes quality. Where does a leaderboard play into this?

How about posting the teams that accomplish their goals in a reasonable time frame? Which team came into the office at nine, left at five, and hit their benchmarks?

With a social media leaderboard like Everwall, that’s why we include three types of leaderboards: Engagement, Interactions and Followers.

The Engagement leaderboard requires people to get other people to reply to or retweet their Tweets that use your hashtag. It’s least susceptible to employees gaming it because they can’t directly manipulate it—for that reason, it’s usually the one we recommend.

The Interactions leaderboard counts each time that a user sends a Tweet using your hashtag, and counts it as another vote on the leaderboard.

The final option that we offer is the Follower leaderboard, and this one just ranks people by the number of followers that they have, so this may work best if you have different social accounts within your company competing for notoriety.

You can use any combination of these leaderboards to create a team environment that sees and recognizes the effort your employees put in to help build your company up, online.

Engage your team for a high-performance workplace

Even with names displayed on a leaderboard, even with the spirit of competition, even with equalizing the playing field as much as you can, none of this works unless your team is engaged. What are the benefits of having your name on a leaderboard if your boss ignores your ideas or if you have such an overwhelming workload that you fight off panic attacks all day? The probably aren’t many benefits, and there is almost certainly no incentive to be more engaged.

Leaderboards can only facilitate performance if employees already feel listened to, respected, and appreciated.

And what does Kareem Abdul-Jabbar have to say about all this? “You can’t win if you don’t play as a unit.”