Life at OYO: Mission 5K challenge

Who doesn’t like a good and fair contest, right? Competition exists in every space. Students compete for grades. Sportspersons, for the top spot. Artistes, for the top award. And professionals, for growth.

Competitive spirit is essential for self-improvement and for driving yourself out of the comfort zone to achieve exceptional results. But it’s important to be mindful of the fine line between healthy and unhealthy competition. Competitiveness, I firmly believe, should be only about giving your best and not about pulling anyone else down. All of us have an obligation to be the “best we can be”. 

At OYO, we love a challenge. Our organization has some of the brightest and smartest minds in the industry who are working to achieve a common mission – that of creating a perfect space in every place. This mission is to all of us what the fisheye was to Arjuna in the Mahabharata. We come to work every day with a single-point agenda – to move closer on our target than we were yesterday.

But when you are busy executing such an ambitious mandate, the daily rush can debilitate even the best of us. At times like these, a healthy contest does the trick. It infuses freshness into the routine, makes work more exciting and rejuvenates the ‘can do’ spirit.

Keeping this in mind, we organized the ‘Mission 5K’ challenge for OYO LIFE’s Supply team. The plan was simple – raise the stakes, pull the might of the entire team together, unlock their true potential and have some fun along the way.

We set an ambitious business target of taking 5K beds live in 4 cities in about 45 days. Every Area Sales Manager and Area Sales Head were given individual missions, which was a percentage of the overall goal. To further motivate the team, there were some amazing prizes for the winners – because what’s a competition without them, right?

At the end of the contest period, we observed something special. While we had fallen marginally short of achieving the “really stretch” numbers, we had exceeded our real target! The team felt motivated and confident like never before. They even confessed about being surprised with their own potential. Today, even after a couple of months, the team has raised the bar for itself and it is constantly delivering in a way that was unheard of before the Mission 5K challenge. Not to forget, team members who came closest to delivering on the challenge won their share of prizes, which included all-expense paid international trips and smartphones.

The real prize, however, remains the spirit with which the entire team rolled up its sleeves and got down to delivering on our mission. Everyone was only concerned about how they can deliver on their mission, which will drive the overall organizational growth instead of outperforming their colleagues to win the competition.

Recently, I met one of our building owner partners, who was impressed by the perseverance of my team members [in this case, the business development team at Gurgaon]. He praised the way OYOpreneurs keep at their work until it’s done and said that he would have given up long ago had he been in our shoes.

To me, that is the biggest victory for OYO – and that’s what makes me proud of being a part of this phenomenal organization that will not stop until it has achieved its mission.