The PeopleLikeUs Champion
Office competition for 2017 and beyond
The title PeopleLikeUs Champion is awarded to the PeopleLikeUs team member who wins a particular and unique challenge. The champion will reign until a new challenge is issued and a new winner is crowned. The champion’s reward, along with glory and worship, is a trophy — a brass unicorn, named Honeydew.
Officially called PeopleLikeUs Championship League, this new initiative was created to award team members for their efforts and accomplishments that are outside of their job, but still within their work. The concept of office competition is not new, but our approach, reasoning, and operation are far from old-fashioned.
we are decisively less Royal and more Rumble.
Challenges call upon the skill set of the PeopleLikeUs team as individuals. They vary from the obvious example of solving specific client problems, but also appear as physical, philanthropic, artistic, or performance based competitions. There are times when some are at clear advantage, for example in the case of a tech or design challenge, but we’ve already learned to be surprised by the results. The allure to compete is to be found in the variety. When each challenge is unique, they are seen as opportunities to try something new or prove your ability in a given discipline.
everyone here is good at more than one thing — the PeopleLikeUs Championship League is a celebration of that.
The broader goals for the company are hidden in the goals of each challenge. They are to provide context for getting internal projects done, for learning new tech, to sharpen skills, and other ideas that certainly elevate our team, but are difficult to find time for outside of our day-to-day tasks. The framework of competition enhances the discovery as competitors riff on one another, building on each other’s ideas (or stealing them outright). The inherent social aspect has also proven beneficial because even as everyone is against each other, the fun of it all is building us up as a better team of individuals.
We have held two championships and have named two champions at the time of this writing. The first was an Instagram contest where the team was asked to get as many new Instagram followers as they could in a month. We hoped to learn best practices for posting on our company account (@peoplelikeus_mtl). The second contest was a Tilt Brush design contest where the team made artistic 3D designs. The hidden goal was to break down the perceived learning curve of getting into VR, a space that we need to understand thoroughly to best serve our clients.
We have unlocked a creative and encouraging competitive spirit that has everyone not just wanting to win, but wanting to compete.
At PeopleLikeUs we blur the lines between creative, accounts, tech, and leadership with the understanding that everyone here is good at more than one thing — the PeopleLikeUs Championship League is a celebration of that. There is nary a project where we assume the role exclusively assigned to us by title. This league has, however, now divided our team into two classes: Those who have claimed the title of PeopleLikeUs Champion and those who have not. It is not unlike the English constitutional concept of the Dignified and the Efficient, wherein the Dignified parties serve to excite and preserve reverence. However, for this reference, we are decisively less Royal and more Rumble. We have unlocked a creative and encouraging competitive spirit that has everyone not just wanting to win, but wanting to compete.
