The Office Jester: Competitive Work Environments

The Office Jester… every office needs one to lighten up overly competitive work environments

Competitive work environments – some offices have them while others don’t. The ones that do have competitive work environments benefit so long as the competition between employees and departments is positive. This is the core concept behind the idea of “employee of the month”. Offer rewards for excellent performance so that employees are compelled to compete with each other and do one better.

Basically, you want competitive work environments. At the same time, you don’t want them to become so cutthroat that your employees starting competing on things other than work. The best example of competitive work environments gone wrong is when employees start competing on personal things. The best example of that personal competition is the following Key & Peele video.

Competitive Work Environments Gone Wrong

We doubt anyone’s ever seen this kind of competitive work environments. This is a completely different level but it is bound to be since it is fiction. In fact, if it wasn’t, it probably wouldn’t be so funny.

If you’ve seen the video (and you should’ve if you’re reading this), you know it’s about facial hair. It’s about two colleagues slugging it out with their beards and moustaches. The entire thing starts fairly small and innocuous when they both end up with the pencil thin goatee. The difference was that one of them had a fly with that goatee.

So began the battle of the fly. No, not that fly. That would be gross. The other fly near the lips. The one upped each other till the one of them created the Chinese pillar of fly!

After that the opponent decided to innovate with a curly, Indian moustache. However, his worthy opponent had already pre-empted the move with his own innovation – something that we call the Chinese wings. For some reason, in their competitive work environments, these guys were heavily influenced by the Chinese culture.

Even so, after the Chinese wings, one of them did something unthinkable. Well, unthinkable in a way, since he obviously thought it up. Is that what they call an oxymoron or is that just us being morons? Anyway, he did something that we did Nazi see coming!

You see what we did there? Did you? Did you? I think we need to get our coats, drop the microphone and strut out of here. Instead, we’ll foolishly carry on. What he did was come up with the Hitler ‘stache. And, he did it exactly when the other guy came up with the Jewish forest. Needless to say, you know who won the game after that. In fact, just to rub in the point that he’d won these competitive work environments, the Hitler ‘stached guy raised his hand in the Nazi salute.