Certain types of competition can motivate employees, causing them to put in more effort, and ultimately achieve better results, according to research. When executed properly, competitions focus employees on goals such as winning, public recognition, or participation.

For a deep dive on the science behind why Leaderboards work, check out this article by Medium.com.

Bringing the element of competition to your streaming network and podcasting program will increase your audience size and drive more participation. Several uStudio customers have seen increased adoption by introducing a friendly competition to their workforce.

A simple competition to begin, and one of our favorites, is instituting a leaderboard. What is great about a leaderboard, is you can implement it in a variety of ways, depending on the immediate goals of your podcast program.

Teams can establish all sorts of Leaderboards. Here are a few examples:

• Top Players - help drive plays by rewarding your top podcast players
• Most Minutes Streamed by user - drive more return users and content streamed within your podcast
• Most Shares by a user - reward your audience for promoting your podcast by sharing it with coworkers
• Most Feedback given - encourage your audience to play a role in your podcast programming

Below is an example of what your podcast leaderboard could look like:

CREATING YOUR LEADERBOARDS

Creating and managing your streaming leaderboard simply requires you to have access to usage data. uStudio administrators can use the Dashboard found in the management console to find relevant metrics.

USING YOUR LEADERBOARD BEYOND POSTING IT

Now that you have your leaderboard, what can you do with it? Here are just a few examples of ways you can use your leaderboard to highlight and reward your most faithful podcast listeners, and encourage others to log more listening time.

1. Use your company communication channels to share your leaderboard and call out your top listeners. This could be through email, intranet site, your corporate social media accounts and on your podcast.
2. Give away or raffle off prizes based on listening time accumulated. People love gift cards and swag!
3. Invite your top listeners to be on your podcast. Interview them and ask them why they listen to the podcast.
4. Create a focus group with your top listeners to help inform decisions on programming and episode content.

Conversely, there are great lessons to be learned by employees who are at the bottom of the leaderboard and not engaging with the podcast as much as you would like. We recommend polling those audience members to investigate barriers for content consumption. Keeping an open feedback loop is critical to your podcast program's success.

According to the Harvard Business Review, when employees interpret their feelings about competition at work as anxiety, they are less likely to select creative behaviors to solve problems, and more likely to be unethical. However, when employees interpret their feelings about competition at work as excitement, they are more likely to select creative behaviors to solve problems.

Put simply, keep your competition positive and encouraging and your podcast audience will want to listen to your streaming network, share episodes with their coworkers and give feedback about your program along the way.

Get creative and find ways to use your podcast leaderboard to help drive adoption across your audience. Keep the competition exciting and positive and you will see your audience numbers increase as your employees engage with your podcast content.